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trevorld / r-optparse

command-line optional argument parser

http://trevorldavis.com/R/optparse/dev/

GNU General Public License v2.0

146 stars 11 forks source link

Compare to r-argparse #45

Open Mitmischer opened 5 months ago

Mitmischer commented 5 months ago

Hello, I'm opening this issue here, but it might just as well be opened at the r-argparse-repo.

New users might need guidance on when to use r-argparse or r-optparse. It is unclear which package is superior to the other and the use cases are identical. From what I understood, r-argparse uses the python package as a backend, so it directly benefits from developments there, but therefore carries additional dependencies. r-optparse has more downloads but that might be for historical reasons and recommendations.

r-argparse appears to be more powerful (but maybe a bit more hurdlesome), due to its python-argparse backbone. Personally, I need support for multiple arguments (and I found issues #36, #22 discussing this and stating that it's missing), so I decided to go with r-argparse.

Note that this was only a very brief evaluation, but one could go into more detail here. Maybe putting a similar document to mine in both or at least one of the repos' READMEs might help users make the right decision. A feature comparison (maybe as a table) might be helpful, too.

trevorld commented 5 months ago

Perhaps add a "Related Software" section of the README with links to the various command-line parsing packages with brief comments. I don't really know all the tradeoffs of some of the other command-line passing packages like docopt written and maintained by others. Note many of the other command-line passing packages aren't at v1.0 (so no promise of stable API) and I'm unsure how high their code coverage is or how actively maintained they are.
I personally use optparse when I only need to support a few optional arguments and argparse when I need more advanced features like sub parsers and named positional arguments.
In terms of features not available in argparse note optparse supports a "callback" feature which can call user-written functions.
I note in details of ?getopt::getopt I did compare getopt with optparse...

trevorld commented 4 months ago

Maybe instead of a detailed section in the README of at least three packages that each would need to be maintained maybe there should be a single "splendid" list of R option parsers with some comparisons of features.

An example of a "splendid" list of game-related R packages: https://github.com/matt-dray/splendid-r-games

Mitmischer commented 4 months ago

All of those suggestions are very reasonable :) I think that having a "splendid" list that is referred to in the respective projects' READMEs would be the best solution. But of course, the choice is up to you - I just wanted to give you a completely new user's perspective on those packages and the initial confusion that comes along with it.

J-Moravec commented 3 weeks ago

There is also argparser which is written in pure R with no dependencies.

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/argparser/index.html

trevorld commented 3 weeks ago

There is also argparser which is written in pure R with no dependencies.

When {optparse} was written there was only {getopt} but now I think there are at least 8 R packages that do command-line parsing
This includes {argparser} which like {getopt} and {optparse} are pure R packages with light dependencies but last time I checked it supported fewer features than {argrparse} (which depends on Python), doesn't promise a stable API (assuming it follows semantic versioning), and doesn't show any code coverage statistics but depending on your needs might be a good choice.