From: David Mansfield <david@cobite.com>
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:38:12 GMT
Subject: Re: Man pages lack of exit status information
Message-ID: <1208453892.16608.44.camel@gandalf.cobite.com>
In-Reply-To: <38b2ab8a0804170138u717fb753me45ead12720c9e3d@mail.gmail.com>


On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 10:38 +0200, Francis Moreau wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 10:17 AM, Wincent Colaiuta <win@wincent.com> wrote:
> > El 17/4/2008, a las 9:45, Francis Moreau escribió:
> > > I checked on a couple of git commands' man pages and I couldn't find
> > > the exit status of these commands.
> > >
> > > For example: git-status, git-diff man pages don't tell anything.
> > >
> > > Am I missing something ?
> > >
> >
> >  The "git-diff" man page documents this under the --exit-code option. It
> > probably would be nice to have an "EXIT STATUS" section added to the man
> > pages of those commands for which it would be interesting (like "git-diff")
> > and perhaps to the main "git" man page as well (with general info).
> >
> >  If there is interest in this I'll whip up a doc patch.
> >
> 
> I think it makes sense to have such section specially since git plumbings are
> also designed to be used in higher level scripts.
> 
> I really use to searching for RETURN VALUE section in man pages when I need
> what a command returns. And it's a pain to have to read the whole man page for
> finding such important information.
> 

+1 for adding a RETURN VALUE section to the docs.

Yes, please!  We need this.  I got burned because git-status does
something which is non-intuitive, and just yesterday I was asking about
git-merge, which I can only assume returns (exits) with 1 if there was a
conflict.

David