Re: [PATCH 1/3] git-help: add -i|--info option to display info page.

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Dec 2, 2007, 09:25 UTC
Message-ID: <7vodd9zbvt.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <475272CF.40602@obry.net>

Pascal Obry <pascal@obry.net> writes:

Show 10 quoted lines

> Christian Couder a écrit :
>> "git help --info XXX" will now call "info git-XXX".
>
> If would be nice if this could be more generic. For example I'd like to
> use Emacs woman mode instead of info. Can't we have something like
>
>    $ git help --ext XXX
>
> "ext" standing for external and calling whatever command recorded into
> .gitconfig for example ?

There is a bit of conflict here. We could do that and make the implementation of "ext" command responsible to transform "commit" in

	$ git help --ext commit

to the location of manual page (or formatted HTML page, or node in the info documentation). git itself does not need to know much about where the help material is in such an implementation.

But Christian's series is about making such "ext" thing easier to write. No matter what kind of web browser is used, it needs to be told where the preformatted HTML page for git-commit command is (and it does not care where git-commit.1 manpage is found or what the node is called in git.info document). It makes it a bit too limiting by defining -w (web) and -i (info) upfront without offering -x (ext), but we need to start somewhere.

Having said that, I think this is a post 1.5.4 material. Please keep the discussion going, so that we can have something people can agree on early after 1.5.4.