Re: [Monotone-devel] nvm.options

[Thomas Keller]

Am 23.07.10 10:42, schrieb Stephen Leake:
> Stephen Leake <address@hidden> writes:
>>>> We could modify the description of _every_ command that now has a
>>>> resettable option. Tedious, but do-able. But perhaps we should consider
>>>> generating the command options from the help texts, automatically? This
>>>> would be a modification of the 'mtn manpage' command. That way the info
>>>> manual would be as complete as the online help.
>>>>
>>>> Or maybe it's ok as is.
>>>
>>> Actually not quite, e.g. "mtn serve" currently lists two hidden options,
>>> --stdio and --no-transport-auth, so again I think we have to go over all
>>> these sections and tweak them accordingly, 
>>
>> I'll work on this.
> 
> I've done this as well.
> 
> In general, I just added [no-] (or equivalent) to the option text,
> without changing the descriptions. That may be confusing, but I think
> it's ok. 

I think this is ok, many thanks for your work as well!

> This would be easier if the manpage code was merged into this branch.
> And that may have to be tweaked for this anyway, so we should wait to
> land this until after the manpage branch lands.

Actually this would not help much, because the code in this branch
specifically outputs man format, not texinfo which we'd actually need.
If we however have several use cases for structured help output, like
generating a man page dynamically from it, including it in the texinfo
manual and maybe even use it for the zsh / bash completion scripts in a
generic way, then maybe a general "dump command tree" command would
indeed be more suitable. But what format should that use? XML? JSON?
YAML? basicio? All these formats have their pros and cons, XML being the
most versatile esp. when XSLT is used, but neither format is easy to
process in shell scripts.

I'm open for suggestions. Depending on the amount of work this would
introduce I tend to put this task after 0.99/1.0 though.

Thomas.

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