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

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 2, 2010, 08:55 UTC
Message-ID: <20100902085533.GL29713@burratino>
In-Reply-To: <4C7F6354.70108@drmicha.warpmail.net>

Michael J Gruber wrote:

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

>> 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.

> 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.