Status of project

[springmeyer]

I see great value to cpp-cli-skel because:

• Command line interfaces are a great way to prototype new projects
• Command line interfaces are a common and very valuable way to distribute C++ code, and therefore establishing best practices for how Mapbox devs develop C++ CLI interfaces is important for scaling our work.

At the same time this project has been dormant, in my mind, because:

• Attention of @mapbox/core-tech has so far been primarily on https://github.com/mapbox/hpp-skel
• https://github.com/mapbox/hpp-skel, because it contains benchmarks and unit tests executables, already has two types of "cli" examples, and therefore is fairly useful for using to prototype (no need for this separate cpp-cli-skel)
• Most serious command line tools end up needing to parse options, and option parsing in C++ requires an external dependency, which raises the harder question of which external dependency, refs Add recommendations for option parsing cpp#35

Questions in my mind:

• Should we put this project on ICE and clearly direct interested people to hpp-skel for prototyping for now?
• Should we put time into investigating the ideal option parser and reboot 0.0.1 #2 with it and get things landed and working?

@mapbox/core-tech

[mapsam]

@springmeyer I'm in favor of ⛸

We aren't maintaining this, plus hpp-skel is our development playground. The only thing missing for me right now are docs on how to create a CLI from hpp-skel. Is that possible? Or at least a section talking about "how to use hpp-skel for CLI tools"

[springmeyer]

The only thing missing for me right now are docs on how to create a CLI from hpp-skel. Is that possible?

Yes, I think it it would be as simple as:

• adding another add_executable call to the CMakeLists.txt of hpp-skel
• dreaming up what the CLI tool would do: maybe it would accept a command line argument for a word to print and print that + provide basic usage if you passed --help?
• Adding a test that tested the command line tool is working (perhaps to the unit tests, they could shell out to it using std::system).