[Freeciv-Dev] (PR#1752) Command line option -d fails with Xaw client

["Jason Short via RT" <rt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[rfalke - Tue Jul 16 14:00:12 2002]:

> 
> The command line argument -d and --debug doesn't work with the Xaw client:
> 
> $ ./civ -d 0
> Error: Can't open display: 0
> $ ./civ --debug 0
> Error: Can't open display:
> 
> Fix: remove the parsed options from argc/argv before they are passed
> to ui_main.

The problem here is twofold.

If FreeCiv gets an argument it doesn't recognize it will print an error
and exit.  So even if -d didn't conflict, there would be no way to use
XAW's -d option.  Likewise, even though --display should work (under
XAW) it doesn't.  This is a problem.

The second problem is the one you point out: right now options are
handled by freeciv and _then_ passed in to ui_main, so in effect they
have two meanings.

To fix just the second problem is easy: just don't pass any options to
ui_main (set argc to 1, and probably argv[1] to NULL).  But if this
becomes a permanent thing then we might as well just not pass these values.

To fix both problems is harder.  We could pull off the freeciv arguments
(without giving an error on unrecognized arguments), and pass the
remaining arguments to ui_main.  We are then counting on ui_main to give
the error/warning if there are any unrecognized arguments.  And note
that --help will only show the freeciv options, not the UI ones (this
could be fixed by introducing a new UI function, ui_print_help() or
similar).

Or we could pass the arguments to a UI function to pull off any
UI-specific ones before handling them ourselves.  This might be easier
since most UIs will do this automatically.  It also lets us print out an
error for any unrecognized options.  But it means the UI will get
priority in taking the arguments, so -d would be interpreted by XAW and
not by freeciv.

A final idea would be to introduce a new argument, --gui.  Any options
before this argument will be handled by FreeCiv.  Any options after it
will be passed untouched to the GUI.  So you could do
  ./civ -d 0 --gui -d :0
to get both behaviors of -d.

None of these solutions for both problems is entirely satisfactory. 
Perhaps we should just fix the first problem for now?

jason