Re: Suggestion: "man git clone"

Hello HP, All,
  I somehow managed to forget this (age must be taking its toll), but 
there is a convention commonly used for man pages of Perl Modules, which 
can be reasonably usable for subcommands as well:

  man APR::Brigade

will work just fine, with a file by the same name. This convention is in 
current use, and would map to

  man git::clone

while :: is not as immediate in context as in Perl, it does do the job, 
and works regardless of pager.

  I would still go with the single big page (people are used to 
vi-search with "/" anyway), but if you want to split the manual this 
would work, and you could refer to the pages explicitly in the main git 
page.

  Finally, and importantly, "apropos clone" or "man -k clone" would 
correctly point to git::clone as a valid result.

  One more option for you.

  Best -F

Federico Lucifredi wrote:

Hello HP,
 I have seen this in (funnily enough) a project I manage myself, which 
has subcommands structured similarly to Git.

 I have looked at options, but so far the current behavior (man foo-bar) 
seems the best option for foo's subcommand bar. The alternative, also 
acceptable, is a large page with subsections for each command. Sections 
(man 1) are used for chapter-like page groupings, not for subsections on 
a single command - those would have to be implemented as an additional 
layer.

 But, as another participant in the thread has commented, that would not 
port to other platforms very quickly (although it would get to Linux and 
OS-X promptly, and may eventually make its way into other platforms).

 I am open to ideas, but so far the two options above are better than 
anything else that has been so far suggested...

 Best -F

H. Peter Anvin wrote:

quoted

Given the recent change of "git-foo" to "git foo", it would be really 
nice if one could type, for example:

    man git clone

and actually get the man page for the git clone command.  There are 
quite a few other pieces of software which also could benefit from 
that kind of indirection.

Right now the above command shows the man page git(1) followed by 
clone(2), which I believe has be classified as utterly useless 
behaviour...

    -hpa

-- 
_________________________________________
-- "'Problem' is a bleak word for challenge" - Richard Fish
(Federico L. Lucifredi) - flucifredi@acm.org