extra help commands (was Re: svn commit: rev 2459 - trunk/www)

[Martin Pool <mb...@sourcefrog.net>]

On 11 Jul 2002, Karl Fogel <kf...@newton.ch.collab.net> wrote:
> Ben Collins-Sussman <su...@collab.net> writes:
> > Heh, sounds like our commandline app would be moving toward a more
> > gdb-like help system:
> > 
> >    svn help properties
> > 
> >       ==> svn help propget, propset, etc.
> > 
> >       ==> svn help keywords
> >  
> >       ==> svn help eol-style
> > 
> > What do others think about this?

I think that would help a lot.  I think good --help text and
interactive help is one of the things that makes GNU tools seem
friendlier than trad unix (gdb vs dbx).  

I don't think subversion needs the full hierarchical system of gdb,
though.

It seems hard to imagine that a few pages of text would bloat the
binary noticeably.  svn isn't the kind of tool that needs to go onto a
boot floppy.  Different parts of the documentation getting out of date
with each other are a bigger problem, but hopefully the --help is
reasonably stable.

One risk is that there may be confusion over which arguments to "help"
are commands, and which are just information pages.  On the other hand
gdb does the same thing, and it doesn't seem to cause too much
confusion.  

In fact, having a special-case command "keywords" might be really
helpful, but that's kind of another question.

-- 
Martin 

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