shFlags 1.2.2 Release Notes

https://github.com/kward/shflags

Preface

This document covers any known issues and workarounds for the stated release of shFlags.

Release info

This is a minor bug fix release.

Please see the CHANGES-1.2.md file for a complete list of changes.

Notable changes

Continuous integration testing setup with Travis CI. This helps keep the code in a working state by executing the unit tests on every submit.

All code run through ShellCheck. This is an excellent shell linter, and brings consistency to the coding patterns used.

The code was restructured to be more GitHub friendly. It should make the code more appealing to a wider audience.

Notable bug fixes

Fixed issue #45. Empty help string causes shflags_test_issue_28.sh to fail.

General info

The unit tests

shFlags is designed to work on as many environments as possible, but not all environments are created equal. As such, not all of the unit tests will succeed on every platform. The unit tests are therefore designed to fail, indicating to the tester that the supported functionality is not present, but an additional test is present to verify that shFlags properly caught the limitation and presented the user with an appropriate error message.

shFlags tries to support both the standard and enhanced versions of getopt. As each responds differently, and not everything is supported on the standard version, some unit tests will be skipped (i.e. ASSERTS will not be thrown) when the standard version of getopt is detected. The reason being that there is no point testing for functionality that is positively known not to exist. A tally of skipped tests will be kept for later reference.

Standard vs Enhanced getopt

Here is a matrix of the supported features of the various getopt variants.

Featurestdenh
short option namesYY
long option namesNY
spaces in string optionsNY
intermixing of flag and non-flag valuesNY

Known Issues

The getopt version provided by default with all versions of Mac OS X (up to and including 10.13.0) and Solaris (up to and including Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris) is the standard version.

Workarounds

The Zsh shell requires the shwordsplit option to be set and the special FLAGS_PARENT variable must be defined. See src/shflags_test_helpers to see how the unit tests do this.