jpastuszek/cli — Issue #1: cli gem
Author: trans
Created: 2012-01-30 06:43:24+00:00
State: open

Hey! You stole my gem! I negotiated a transfer of the `cli` gem in November with James Charles Russell, the owner of the old gem. I promised him I would keep support for his old interface in my new lib. I'v been very busy through the Christmas season and was just now getting ready to release it when, lo, I up and find out that you've pushed a gem to it.

I would like it back, please!

Now, I'm not unreasonable and I took a look at your library with the thought that perhaps it being a significantly awesome CLI library then I would consider letting it go. But, in all honestly, your cli lib is much the same library as about a half dozen or so other libraries that are out there. I'm not degrading your work, please don't misunderstand. Implementation looks well done from what I've seen. But it's simply the fact that your CLI library is essentially the same library as many others. Some that are fairly popular are:

* Trollop (http://trollop.rubyforge.org)
* Slop (https://github.com/injekt/slop)
* micro-optparse (http://florianpilz.github.com/micro-optparse/)

There's also Thor, albeit a little different interface, is nonetheless similar and extremely popular due to it's use by Rails.

And personally. the one I think is the very best b/c of it's utter simplicity is CLAP (http://druwerd.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/clap-command-line-arguments-parsing/).

So given all these choices (and then some) I can't help but wonder why you weren't happy enough with any of those? Or at least try contributing to one of those projects if it were close to what you'd like sans a feature or two?

Well, I figure none of that is going to convince you. After all, we programmers generally like to scratch our own itch. So I tell you what I am going to do. Instead of trying to beg the gem away from you, you just hang on to it for safe keeping. I'll release my work under another name, and then I will demonstrate it to you. Given that you keep an unbiased mind, I have no doubt you will be sufficiently impressed enough to up and re-release the cli gem as a metagem just to install mine ;-) Okay, I might be going a little overboard there. But I do think you will be impressed.

Regardless of my work, I think you will ultimately decide to jump ship b/c command line parsers are one of those notorious monsters that we all think ti would cool to create but in the end aren't worth the trouble, so we think, 'ey', might as well use 'optparse'.