From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Thu, 03 Dec 2009 01:34:01 GMT
Subject: Re: Git documentation consistency
Message-ID: <7vaay096ye.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <m1NG0O6-000kmgC@most.weird.com>

"Greg A. Woods" <woods@planix.com> writes:

> 	$ ls -?
> 	ls: unknown option -- ?
> 	usage: ls [-AaBbCcdFfghikLlmnopqRrSsTtuWwx1] [file ...]
> ...
> Most other commands know '-?', and despite
> the silliness with GNU Ls, use of '-?' to request summary usage
> information is pretty much a de facto standard for unix commands.

I think you are showing ignorance here, as -? is *not* even close to
standard, nor even widely used practice at all.  I somehow doubt your ls
would respond to "ls -X" any differently from "ls -?", but is giving the
same canned response to any unknown option.

The "usage: ls [-AaBbC...] [file...]" indeed is much better than abstract
"usage: frotz <options> <args>" that does not list what <options> are, but
that is a totally different thing.  On that point, I think Peff already
made a good suggestion of giving the full help text in such a case.