Re: [RFC PATCH] git-help: find library man pages again

Michael J Gruber wrote:

Jonathan Nieder venit, vidit, dixit 02.09.2010 10:16:

quoted

Therefore this seems wrong to me (except as a backward-compatibility
measure).

[...]

One heuristic, which I would have left for a later patch because of its
radicality (and I think we're in some phase of some rc something), is to
simply not do any checks when calling the viewers. This requires that
everything is prepended with "git-", which I see you have done in
builtin/help.c.

Yep, I agree with you in all respects, including the need to do
something else (like the patch you sent) for v1.7.3.

Still, none-command help pages will not show up with
"git help -a". So it's not a complete solution.

I think of "git --help -a" as a more complete version of the list
from "git --help" --- that is, it is explaining what subcommands are
available for git.

On the other hand, on platforms where "man -k git" is not available,
as you mention it is the index to the manual.  Maybe "git help" should
check GIT_HTML_PATH to provide a more complete index on such platforms.

Just musing.

Alternatively, load_command_list() etc. could simply fill up a third
list "other_pages" (with non-executables) so that "git help -a" could
list "other help pages" in addition to the commands. I don't think this
would require any renaming nor Documentation updates.

Looks like you had a similar thought.

??? I guess this patch makes sense only after a patch which renames all
gitfoo.txt to git-foo.txt.

Well, there were ulterior motives to that patch: I keep on mistyping
half-hyphenated manpage names like gitcvs-migration.

I should have included some appropriate Makefile magic for
compatibility symlinks for the old names.  Hopefully at least the idea
was clear.