Re: [PATCH] git help: promote 'git help -av'

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2018 at 07:44:51PM +0200, Duy Nguyen wrote:

> > I think adding another section about external commands in "help -av"
> > would address the "clang-format" stuff. With that, it's probably good
> > enough to completely replace "help -a". It may also be good to list
> > aliases there too in a separate section so you have "all you can type"
> > in one (big) list.
> 
> Here's the patch that adds that external commands and aliases
> sections. I feel that external commands section is definitely good to
> have even if we don't replace "help -a". Aliases are more
> subjective...

Just eyeballing the output, it looks pretty reasonable to me. The lack
of explanation for external commands really stands out, but there's not
much we can do.

That part of the output is not very compact, and we _could_ put it in
columns, but that might be confusing since the rest of the output is
one-per-line.

Mentioning aliases seems reasonable to me. The definitions of some of
mine are pretty nasty bits of shell, but I guess that people either
don't have any ugly aliases, or are comfortable enough with them that
they won't be scared away. :)

> -- 8< --
> @@ -53,7 +52,6 @@ static struct option builtin_help_options[] = {
>  			HELP_FORMAT_WEB),
>  	OPT_SET_INT('i', "info", &help_format, N_("show info page"),
>  			HELP_FORMAT_INFO),
> -	OPT__VERBOSE(&verbose, N_("print command description")),
>  	OPT_END(),
>  };

Would we want to continue respecting "-v" as a noop? I admit I did not
even know it existed until this thread, but if people have trained
themselves to run "git help -av", we should probably continue to give
them this output.

-Peff