I seem to recall seeing something similar at the URP, and it seems down today for me too. It's unfortunate to hear about the ad hock option handling.

I didn't know about the URP when I first started work on the Perl reconstruction of core utilities, else I might have just contributed to that (or at least investigated whether contributing was something I wanted to do), but it's kind of a moot point now since I changed my focus from Perl to OCaml for that purpose.