Since --help is the the topic de jure ... ... adding a popt table processor callback to transform --help spewage opaquely into whatever form is desired, with some simple transforms like HTML tables or DocBook XML markup or YAML used for configuring persistent option default settings, or the existing --help spewage, is likely useful.
Most --help display formats aren't /dev/tty these days ... its more painful to do the /dev/tty plumbing than it is to just pass along popt table entries to output methods. Note that a opaque (*help_transform) pluggable callback is what I propose ... no way do I want to see POPT start acquiring heavyweight linkages like -lxml2/-lexpat/-lsyck/-lwhatever. But almost certainly a reasonable API could be added so that --help transforms, with some reasonably simple (like the existing --help CLI display) transform vectors within -lpopt explicitly. 73 de Jeff ______________________________________________________________________ POPT Library http://rpm5.org Developer Communication List popt-devel@rpm5.org