[PHOENIX-5488] Migrate Phoenix from commons-cli to picocli

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Reopened
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Remko Popma
• Created: 22/Sep/19 05:50
• Updated: 06/Apr/23 07:45

Description

Looking at PHOENIX-3710, the lack of quoting support in commons-cli can cause issues at times. If my understanding is correct, the proposed patch would not be necessary if the command line parser library did not incorrectly strip off the quotes. (Bugreports were filed against this in 2015 and 2017.)

Would there be any interest in migrating from commons-CLI to the picocli library?

Other than picocli's support for quoted values, it has some other functionality that may be of interest to Phoenix users:

• @-files (argument files)
• interactive (password) options (where password is not echoed to the console)
• bash/zsh autocompletion
• colored usage help message (lower cognitive load)

Developer advantages are

• less code
• meticulous documentation
• tracing facility for troubleshooting

And finally, picocli is actively maintained. (Disclaimer: I maintain picocli.)

Thoughts?