Re: msysgit, help: teach git help to open html from /doc/git/html/

From: Steffen Prohaska <prohaska@zib.de>
Date: Aug 11, 2007, 22:05 UTC
Message-ID: <37CBFBA3-6A07-44D7-BFCF-5C969C123000@zib.de>
In-Reply-To: <7vps1tlpbb.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Aug 11, 2007, at 11:43 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> Steffen Prohaska <prohaska@zib.de> writes:
>
>> Junio,
>> are you interested in such patches at this time. The patch doesn't
>> interfere with the existing code, but clutters it with ifdefs.
>
> Actually "showing HTML pages upon 'git help' request" makes
> sense even on Unixen.  I think a patch to help.c::cmd_help()
> that allows the user to specify alternate action before going to
> the codepath to call show_man_page(help_cmd) would make sense,
> like the attached patch.

So the custom command needs to have the knowledge how to find the page (as 'man' has), based on the string 'git-<command>'.

Makes sense to me to build only the generic mechanism into help.c and delegate the rest to core.helpcmd.

> Having said that, a patch that makes the build procedure depend
> on the presense of the html branch is unacceptable, as that
> branch does not even exist in my private build repository.

Sure, the build procedure doesn't depend on it. The executable wouldn't do anything useful if no html is present.

> If you are building html pages from the source, it surely would
> make sense.

I'd prefer to fetch pages from your repo, at least for msysgit. Building them requires tools that are, to my knowledge, not present in msysgit.

	Steffen