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From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/25] Usage message clean-up
Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2005 18:58:44 -0800
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To: Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>
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Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

>> * -h and --help makes the script die with the usage message.
>
> Good.

Supporting -h and --help are good, but we probably do not want
to exit with non-zero status in such a case.  Not a big deal,
though.

>> * The message is printed to stderr.
>
> Arguable.

One thing I really hate is a program that does more than one
pageful of help message to stderr which forces me to do "blah
>&2 --help | less", but our help messages are short and sweet,
so I feel stderr is OK.

>> * The message is of the form "usage: $0 options"
>
> Not good. We are in a transition to "git whatever" from "git-whatever".

But when the user wishes to look at the manual page, he needs to
say "man git-whatever", so either way you cannot win.  I'm
neutral either way, as long as we are consistent.

> Besides, I have to admit that I am a bit annoyed by 25 mini mails for the 
> same purpose.

I'd appreciate the flexibility of reviewing them indivudually,
especially when some of them seem to change the structure of the
argument parsing loop.