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Comment by awoimbee | Hacker News Reader

> In the end, we chose the potential dangers of reimplementing command line parsing over the potential issues of including clap

Have you considered using argh ? Seems like it has the upsides without the downsides.

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Don’t think it’s worth it. Looking at sudo’s man page at https://linux.die.net/man/8/sudo, it looks like sudo only uses single-letter flags, some of which take arguments. Argh implements long options, built-in parsing, subcommands, and lots of other nice to have features that nevertheless add a lot of code. It’s normal in traditional UNIX C programs to parse sudo-style flags in a handful of lines without any external dependencies.

I consider single letter flags only to be a mistake. There should almost always be a verbose double-dash option.

I get it, most of the tooling which uses single letters is totally ossified due to backwards compatibility reasons. However, the sudors team is already breaking backwards compat. Now is the time to make a minor usability improvement.

I consider double-dashes to be a mistake. hell, after a few drinks and quiet thought I consider single dashes to be a mistake. Perhaps the dd arg=val form is actually the ideal argv method after all. What if getopt was all a huge mistake. And then I sober up and realize they are just dashes, useless but harmless, not a thing worth worrying about.

And then you have the absolutely inane doubledash --arg=value format. Way to carry a bad idea to it's logical conclusion guys. somebody drunk their getopt kool-aid that morning. just get rid of the stupid dashes if you are going to do that.

That's a bit dated. Both regular sudo (1.9.13p3) and sudo-rs (0.2.2) on my machine (Debian) support double dash style options.

I've used argh a fair bit. It has some weird ideas and restrictions and generally isn't nearly as good as clap. I would definitely recommend clap (unless you have extreme security concerns like this).

Why not use `getopt()` which already exists in libc?

(Or even `getopt_long()` if you're Linux/glibc-only? Author mentions not supporting Windows, but is unclear whether non-Linux Unices, e.g. *BSD, are intended target platforms.)

https://manpages.debian.org/bookworm/manpages-dev/getopt.3.e...

If you're trying to implement as much in Rust as possible, keeping an important part of the codebase in C code feels like the wrong decision, in my opinion.

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