Re: Improve 'git help' with basic user guide linkss

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

"Philip Oakley" <philipoakley@iee.org> writes:

> I'm looking at extending the 'git help' to include some information
> for the basic user who isn't ready for the extensive man page
> documentation for the various commands.

We have pointers at the beginning of "git(1)" for that exact reason.
I am not saying the documents pointed at from there are perfect, but
shouldn't that approach work?

> My real question is on the right approach to generating a list of
> guides and including them into the git help options. I'm planning on
> extending the command-list.txt file to include 'guides' and then
> extending the generate-cmdlist.sh to generate a guides array in
> common-cmds.h.

Having a catalog of guide documents in help.o sounds like a good way
to go, but I doubt "command-list" is a good place to store it.  It
is about git subcommands, "git help -a" uses it to show the list of
them, and the bash completion support uses the list via "git help -a".

The common-cmds.h does not have to be the only avenue to add your
catalog of guide documents to help.o. As a part of the build
procedure, you can list Documentation/guides/ and generate an array
definition into "guides.h", and add #include "guides.h" in help.c,
for example.

> I'm thinking of adding -g --guides and -c --commands options to
> complement the existing -a --all (becomes both commands and guides)

Complement is fine.  Contaminating -a with guides is probably not.

> I was expecting to update the user-manual. to become
> gituser-manual.txt so that the existing 'git help user-manual' scheme
> would discover it. The Tutorial and the User manual obviously(?) being
> the first port of call for the confused user.

Again, we do have pointer to tutorial fairly prominently at the
beginning of "git(1)".  Perhaps we want index.html that redirects to
git.html or something?