Hi Duy,
On 07/04/2019 04:20, Duy Nguyen wrote:
On Sun, Apr 7, 2019 at 12:31 AM Philip Oakley <philipoakley@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Following the discussions about the tag peeling issue, I thought to have
a look at what the git glossary says.
I had it in my head that when the git guides were linked to the help
system, that the --help option provided a short circuit direct to help
item. However this did not happen.
I found that the capability had been lost, which given that a lot of the
underpinning knowledge is in the guides this would appear to be a loss.
I don't have an older version to test, but I thought I remember the
capability from about the time of my 65f98358c0 ("builtin/help.c: add
--guide option", 2013-04-02).
Have I misremembered the --help capability?
cc'ing Duy in case he remembers something from the recent update
Phew... I didn't break anything!
That behavior has been gone since 2c6b6d9f7d (help: make option --help
open man pages only for Git commands, 2016-08-26). Ralf did not
mention why he thought "git <concept> --help" was a bad idea. But it
was considered a bug by Junio [1]
[1] https://public-inbox.org/git/CAPc5daXicjUDi6B-MA8Sn=_UZ_jHvc8SE4ZXt2dHbbDQkD7=WA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
Thanks for the link. I see I responded later in the thread but didn't
follow it up sufficiently (not sure what I was doing back then.. summer
break maybe).
I do think we are sometimes a bit dismissive of features (accidental
bias) that help the general user in getting help. If we think that 'git
help' is the (one) right way of providing access to manuals (such as the
concept guides) then maybe we shouldn't have the ubiquitous --help
option for all the commands. Or,
Or, we should be liberal in what we accept from others (Postel's Law).
It is normal to type 'git foo --help'. So maybe allow these multiple
ways of accessing the documentation. Given the update to the command
list capability, I'll add it to my todo list to see if we can accept
guide names with --help and, one way or another, get folk to the right
place (the guide or command they should have used/requested).
--
Philip
