Thread (5 messages) flat view 5 messages, 4 authors, 2016-06-15

Re: git alias and --help

From: Gelonida N <hidden>
Date: 2016-06-15 22:52:20

On 10/28/2011 06:05 AM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
Miles Bader [off-list ref] writes:
quoted
Of course, that would be the wrong thing for somebody that just wants
to be reminded what an alias expands too, but my intuition is that
this is a very tiny minority compared to people that want to examine
the options for the underlying command...
And it is doubly wrong if help backend is configured to be anything but
manpages, no?
Well. Then it is already doubly wrong today, isnt it?
The output of 'git help b'
is not a man page I assume.

In my opinion chaning it to a short message + the output of a man page
is not really worse than today's behaviour.
As I said, you should be able to come up with a patch that detects and
special cases the no frills case (replacement to single token) to get what
you want.
That's perhaps the most comfortable one, though occasionally I am even
interested in the help text of a git command if I had an alias like

l = log --name-status

to see what other switches I could add


(Thus an alternative suggestion to display both or to have a special
syntax allowing to force displaying of a man page)



Another small detail:

Let's assume I have following alias:

log = log --name-status


In this case I directly get the help text for git log
if I typed 'git log --help' (or 'git help log').
I don't even see, that my log is in reality aliased.
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