Re: Make --help output fit within 80 columns per line

On 2023-09-25 15:27, torikoshia wrote:
> Ugh, regression tests failed and it appears to be due to reasons
> related to meson.
> I'm going to investigate it.

ISTM

On 2023-10-06 19:49, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On 25.09.23 08:27, torikoshia wrote:
>>> So in summary, I think 80 is a decent soft limit, but let's not
>>> stress out about some lines going over that, and make a hard limit of
>>> perhaps 120.
>>
>> +1. It may be a good compromise.
>> For enforcing the hard limit, is it better to add a regression test
>> like patch 0001?
>
>> Agreed. It seems inconsistent with other commands.
>> Patch 0002 removed environment-variable-based defaults in psql --help.
>
> I have committed 0002 and a different implementation of 0001. I set
> the maximum line length to 95, which is the current maximum in use.

Thanks!

BTW as far as I investigated, the original 0002 patch failed because
current meson doesn't accept subtest outputs.

As I commented below thread a few days ago, they once modified to
accept subtest outputs, but not anymore.
https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/10032

> I'm open to discussing other line lengths, but
>
> 1) If we make it longer, then we should also adjust the existing
> wrapping so that we don't have a mix of lines wrapped at 80 and some
> significantly longer lines.
>
> 2) There are some general readability guidelines that suggest like 66
> or 72 characters per line. If you take that and add the option name
> itself and some indentation, then around 90 does seem like a sensible
> limit.
>
> 3) The examples from other tools posted earlier don't convince me.
> Some of their --help outputs look like junk and poorly taken care of.
>
> So I think nudging people to aim for 80..95 seems like a good target
> right now. But I'm not against adjustments.

--
Regards,

--
Atsushi Torikoshi
NTT DATA Group Corporation