Re: merge --no-ff is NOT mentioned in help

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

Mike Rappazzo <rappazzo@gmail.com> writes:

> (Please reply inline)

Indeed ;-)

> On Wed, Nov 16, 2016 at 10:48 AM, Vanderhoof, Tzadik
> <tzadik.vanderhoof@optum360.com> wrote:
>> I am running:    git version 2.10.1.windows.1
>>
>> I typed: git merge -h
>>
>> and got:
>>
>> usage: git merge [<options>] [<commit>...]
>>    or: git merge [<options>] <msg> HEAD <commit>
>>    or: git merge --abort
>>
>>     -n                    do not show a diffstat at the end of the merge
>>...
>>     --overwrite-ignore    update ignored files (default)
>>
>> Notice there is NO mention of the "--no-ff" option
>
> I understand.  On my system I can reproduce this by providing a bad
> argument to `git merge`.  This is the output from the arg setup.  For
> "boolean" arguments (like '--ff'), there is an automatic counter
> argument with "no-" in there ('--no-ff') to disable the option.  Maybe
> it would make sense to word the output to include both.

I think that was a deliberate design decision to avoid cluttering
the short help text with mention of both --option and --no-option.

People interested may want to try the attached single-liner patch to
see how the output from _ALL_ commands that use parse-options API
looks when given "-h".  It could be that the result may not be too
bad.

I suspect that we may discover that some options that should be
marked with NONEG are not marked along the way, which need to be
fixed.


 parse-options.c | 4 +++-
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/parse-options.c b/parse-options.c
index 312a85dbde..348be6b240 100644
--- a/parse-options.c
+++ b/parse-options.c
@@ -626,7 +626,9 @@ static int usage_with_options_internal(struct parse_opt_ctx_t *ctx,
 		if (opts->long_name && opts->short_name)
 			pos += fprintf(outfile, ", ");
 		if (opts->long_name)
-			pos += fprintf(outfile, "--%s", opts->long_name);
+			pos += fprintf(outfile, "--%s%s", 
+				       (opts->flags & PARSE_OPT_NONEG) ? "" : "[no-]",
+				       opts->long_name);
 		if (opts->type == OPTION_NUMBER)
 			pos += utf8_fprintf(outfile, _("-NUM"));