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

Jonathan Nieder venit, vidit, dixit 02.09.2010 10:55:

Michael J Gruber wrote:

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

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

[...]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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??? 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.

That's exactly why I use "git help foo" rather than "man git[-]?foo" and
want it to Just Work (TM);)

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

I was just wondering what this patch applies to - you must have
all-dashed documentation to begin with. And I actually think this would
be fine, unless we want to differentiate between command man pages and
other man pages by that. It's just that the shell libraries are half way
in between, and "git-remote-helpers.txt" is misnamed by that convention.

Michael