From: Junio C Hamano Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2005 02:58:44 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/25] Usage message clean-up Message-ID: <7vbqzouyor.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net> In-Reply-To: Johannes Schindelin writes: >> * -h and --help makes the script die with the usage message. > > Good. Supporting -h and --help are good, but we probably do not want to exit with non-zero status in such a case. Not a big deal, though. >> * The message is printed to stderr. > > Arguable. One thing I really hate is a program that does more than one pageful of help message to stderr which forces me to do "blah >&2 --help | less", but our help messages are short and sweet, so I feel stderr is OK. >> * The message is of the form "usage: $0 options" > > Not good. We are in a transition to "git whatever" from "git-whatever". But when the user wishes to look at the manual page, he needs to say "man git-whatever", so either way you cannot win. I'm neutral either way, as long as we are consistent. > Besides, I have to admit that I am a bit annoyed by 25 mini mails for the > same purpose. I'd appreciate the flexibility of reviewing them indivudually, especially when some of them seem to change the structure of the argument parsing loop.