Discuss better CLI parsing / startup-options

sonicfromnewyoke commented 1 week ago

Problem

I'd like to discuss that https://github.com/orgs/Syndica/projects/2/views/1?pane=issue&itemId=47708039 in the proposal.

there are a couple of libraries in zig ecosystem for writing CLI applications

zig-clap which was built with a reference to the original clap from the rust's world
zig-args - simple-to-use argument parser with struct-based config
yazap - brand-new zig library for building seamless (in authors opinion) cli-apps

Proposal

to discuss the pros and cons of each library which were listed above and choose the best one

However, I, personally ,would prefer to parse yaml/toml config file, as it was done in the firedancer

Because It's tedious to pass 20+ node options to start-up the script. And, IMO, it's easier to specify all the configurations grouped by labels, and yaml/toml config is more convenient for that.

yes, you can say something like: "this is a skill issue" and reference to shell-script like the following

#!/bin/sh
STARTUP_OPTS="..."
ENTRYPOINT_OPTS="..."
RPC_OPTS="..."
// ....
FINAL="$STARTUP_OPTS $ENTRYPOINT_OPTS $RPC_OPTS ..."

exec agave-validator $FINAL

or something similar with templates

Alternatives

as an alternative to yaml/toml config file, we can discuss ziggy - a zig-based schema language that can validate your config against data-layout

Additional Context

No response

InKryption commented 1 week ago

Personally, not a fan of YAML - my vote is against that. As a side note, and this doesn't entail any promise of anything, but I am working on a personal project where the CLI parser is based on a markdown file which would act both as the help string and as the template. If I get that up and running I'd like to pitch it, but otherwise the options outlined here (aside from YAML) seem good to me.

Sobeston commented 1 week ago

Ziggy does seem super cool. I asked Loris on his (super unbiased) opinion on using Ziggy, and he suggested starting with JSON or something and then switching to Ziggy later once he's done another design pass; we might not want to beta test it.

Syndica / sig