Re: [Monotone-devel] proposal for integrating manual and CLI help more closely

[Marcel van der Boom]

On 24 jul 2005, at 13:27, Nathaniel Smith wrote:

> On Sun, Jul 24, 2005 at 09:54:43AM +0200, Marcel van der Boom wrote:
>
> > 3. mtn help command (instead of the --help option) is used to access
> > that collection of man pages
> > 4. the --help option displays the synopsis only with a mention to use
> > mtn help 'command' to get detailed info
>
> Minor quibble: It seems somewhat surprising that 'foo --help' and
> 'help foo' are different.
Yeah, i can relate to that. Not a big issue. It would make sense to me:
mt --help <whatever> -> short usage instruction (option applies to mt)
mt help <whatever> -> perform the help command on whatever

but if they would do the same, fine with me.

> Bigger concern: How do we display these man pages?  In particular
> keeping in mind that we need to work on win32, which has no man page
> infrastructure in place (i.e., shelling out to 'man
> monotone-<command name>' doesn't work).
I used man format as that gave the quickest route to the prototype in  
my environment. I'm not sure there is a common denominator on all  
platforms we could use, but 'man' seemed the most logical choice,  
considering it's also a lightweight thing which could be put on  
windows. (if only by distributing a mingw/msys/cygwin man.exe along  
with monotone.)

Actually putting the 'help pages' in the man db/hierarchy is not  
directly needed but we might as well.

marcel
--
Marcel van der Boom
HS-Development BV               --   http://www.hsdev.com
So! webapplicatie framework  --   http://make-it-so.info

smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature