Providing Help for Command-Line Build Options

SCons User Guide 0.98.0
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# 9.7. Providing Help for Command-Line Build Options

To make command-line build options most useful, you ideally want to provide some help text that will describe the available options when the user runs `scons -h`. You could write this text by hand, but SCons provides an easier way. `Options` objects support a `GenerateHelpText` method that will, as its name indicates, generate text that describes the various options that have been added to it. You then pass the output from this method to the `Help` function:

             opts = Options('custom.py')
             opts.Add('RELEASE', 'Set to 1 to build for release', 0)
             env = Environment(options = opts)
             Help(opts.GenerateHelpText(env))

SCons will now display some useful text when the `-h` option is used:

          % scons -Q -h

          RELEASE: Set to 1 to build for release
              default: 0
              actual: 0

          Use scons -H for help about command-line options.

Notice that the help output shows the default value, and the current actual value of the build option.

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