Re: New help section 'Global Options'?

Ben Reser wrote:
> On 7/3/14 12:21 PM, Gabriela Gibson wrote:
>> Currently, the global options are displayed on many svn help topics, and that's
>> an extra 16 lines at the end, which makes the actual help info that is sought
>> scroll off the screen, and it's not information that always needed.
>>
>> What do you think about moving the global options to their own help section and
>> leaving just one line with a pointer to them?
>
> I'd rather we left things as they are.  Especially if we actually finish and
> merge in the work to execute the pager automatically as we've started working
> on over in the automatic-pager branch.

As it is, without the pager, I find it poor. The help section describing global options is long and irrelevant to a large proportion of use cases. I don't feel terribly strongly about it for my own sake -- I always use a terminal with a fairly large number of visible lines and a large scroll-back capacity -- but I think it's poor form to display all this minority-interest text right in front of every user's face every time.

Notice that half of this text is about authentication, and is displayed even for the commands that can't do authentication such as 'svn add'!

I think Subversion would be better if changed the way we show it.

> Once we have the automatic pager it'll be inconvenient to flip from one help
> topic to another since you'll have to leave the pager.

The point is we think people don't often need or want to flip from the help on 'svn add' to the help on supplying a password or any of the other global options. Or even from 'svn commit'. Anyway, we don't have the automatic pager, and when we do, it isn't going to be mandatory, is it? The help output in pager mode can list the global options in full if we want.

> There's also been some discussion about making the man pages be generated from
> our help output rather than be a fairly static file telling people to run our
> help sub-command.

Yup, but we don't have that either, and that doesn't detract from this suggestion either, as the man page for a subcommand doesn't have to be generated as a straight dump of the corresponding help output: it could have all the global options explained in full if we want.

- Julian
Received on 2014-07-07 12:37:31 CEST