Re: PATCH: tidy documentation of ld command-line option syntax

[Sandra Loosemore <sandra at codesourcery dot com>]

Dave Korn wrote:
> Sandra Loosemore wrote:
> > [...] While the
> > "--option=value" syntax is already discussed generally in the ld manual,
> > and many ld command-line options are already documented that way,
> > several others are not.  This patch fixes the documentation of those
> > remaining long options to consistently use the "--option=value" syntax.
>
>   I would have preferred if you didn't actually conceal the existence of the
> "--option value" form but just added the "--option=value" form where missing.
>  That might be confusing to anyone who is familiar with standard getopt()
> behaviour.  Did you consider and decide against doing it that way for some reason?

I just played a bit with listing *both* the "--option=value" and "--option 
value" forms of each command, as you suggest.  I didn't really have any 
particular reason not to do that in the first place, but having looked at it, I 
think it adds a great deal of verbosity and repetitiveness to the documentation 
and does not actually make ld any easier to use.  So I would not recommend that 
we do that.

I also note, BTW, that the manual is not consistent in using either "-ovalue" or 
"-o value" for single-letter options.  IMO, the former is somewhat hard to read. 
 How about if, as a compromise, I consistently formatted all single-letter 
options as "-o value", and all the long options as "--option=value"?  I think 
listing all 4 possible format permutations for each command would be silly, anyway.

-Sandra