Re: address@hidden: help2man and indented help text]

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   Guessing which lines are continuations and which are new lines is
   darned tricky, and the rules help2man uses are intended to deal
   with the majority of cases.

I don't know how help2man does this in detail, but wouldn't it work
just to see if the next line as a option (either, -s or --short).  And
assume that if doesn't, that it is a continuation?  This would solve
all cases I think.

Then even something like:

       -v, --very-long-option-name
                           is described on this line,
                             and this one...

                             more text...
                           even more text

Would work; since we only stop scanning when we come to a new option.

Since we would just concatenate all the lines that do not have a
option listed.  One might need to do a special execption for cases
when you have text that starts on the first column.  I.e. something
like tar uses (and some of the Hurd I belive):

Informative output:
      --help            print this help, then exit
      --version         print tar program version number, then exit
  -v, --verbose         verbosely list files processed


But I think that this would work in more cases then the current algo
works.  Also should be quite easy to implement.

Well, I haven't pondered about this any more, but what do you think?


Happy hacking.