[darcs-users] Re: Make "darcs help" a real command

Mark Stosberg mark at summersault.com
Sat Apr 2 14:59:07 UTC 2005


On 2005-04-02, Michael G Schwern <schwern at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 02, 2005 at 10:32:48AM +0200, Thomas Zander wrote:
>> On Saturday 02 April 2005 08:50, Michael G Schwern wrote:
>> > It really should be a real command. ?Every system should respond to
>> > "help". In this case darcs does it unofficially. ?Make it official.
>> 
>> ls help
>> ls: help: No such file or directory
>> 
>> cvs help
>> Unknown command: `help'
>> 
>> etc.
>> You don't have much experience with how gnu formats its commands?  They use 
>> dashes!

I'm with Michael on this one. 

"darcs help" is already an unofficial command, because it does the
display the help options, and because it prints them to STDERR and
scrolls off the screen, it's easy not to notice that the reason the help
is being displayed is because the command is missing. 

I like the idea of making darcs so user friendly that the manual is needed
much less. That means that it needs to allow for users to discover how
to use it. While I think aliases should be used conservatively,
supporting "darcs help" in addition to darcs --help seems reasonable. 

We can document one as the official help command, and the other can
mostly be there to be 'discovered' for people who are guessing what the
help command is. 

> 4) As has been noted many times, CVS is old and flawed which invalidates the
> "cvs doesn't do this" argument.  And since when does darcs blindly follow CVS?
> Additionally SVN, SVK and even bash respond to "help".

And then there's 'tla', which supports "--help", "-H" and "help", but
they all do different things...

    Mark

-- 
http://mark.stosberg.com/ 





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