This (and #12 as well) has been already been implemented manually in the Snort sensor (I was told that people do run multiple Snort instances) by letting the user specify values passed to prelude_sensor_init(), hence this possibility should not be removed. Additionally libprelude cannot parse Snort's command line directly so care should be taken with including any functionality requiring access to the command line.

The workaround you are describing here is a common workaround which work well for sensor not depending uppon prelude-getopt. The point of this ticket is to make the functionnality available to anyone who want to use it (things won't be broken for sensors not using prelude-getopt).