Help message bug

[masics]

Assume you have following configuration:

val configFile by parser.storing("--config", "-c", argName = "CONFIGFILE", help = "Configuration file") { asPath }
val version by parser.flagging("--version", help = "print version and exit")

Invoking command like script --config filename --help will print:

usage: script [-h] [--config CONFIGFILE] [--version]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help             show this help message and exit

  --config CONFIGFILE,   Excel file with MLM configuration
  -c CONFIGFILE

  --version              print version and exit

As you can see "--config" is under optional arguments. It must be under mandatory ones.

If you execute: script --help The result is correct (config is under required):

usage: script [-h] --config CONFIGFILE [--version]

required arguments:
  --config CONFIGFILE,   Excel file with MLM configuration
  -c CONFIGFILE

optional arguments:
  -h, --help             show this help message and exit

  --version              print version and exit

[xenomachina]

Believe it or not, this is actually intentional behavior.

The motivation for this behavior is that you could create a wrapper scripts that supplied the option. eg:

#!/bin/bash
# autumn-script.sh
./script --config /usr/lib/script/autumn.config "$@"

and:

#!/bin/bash
# winter-script.sh
./script --config /usr/lib/script/winter.config "$@"

Now invoking autumn-script.sh or winter-script.sh will report --config as being optional.

I admit that this behavior is somewhat surprising. My assumption was that it would be pretty rare that a user would supply other options in addition to --help, except in the case where they were using a wrapper script that passed through options like the above examples.