Re: git alias and --help

From: Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>
Date: Oct 28, 2011, 18:25 UTC
Message-ID: <CADCnXoaPbCK0B=XZwdAY=yEb61YhvyQ6FA=BAxkADJ6hra-_Lg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7v62j9t2gj.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

2011/10/29 Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>:

Show 9 quoted lines

>    $ git lgf --help
>    'git lgf' is aliased to 'log --oneline --boundary --first-parent'
>
> with "git log --help", but that is aiming too low for my taste.
>
> If you are redesigning the help system, isn't it a shame that you are
> discarding other tokens in the alias when giving help? Wouldn't it be
> wonderful if you extracted the option descriptions for these three options
> specified and showing only that, for example?

I think that would be the wrong thing in most cases though: an alias like the above happily allows the user to specify other git-log options on the command line; when I get help on an aliased option, it's often precisely because I want to see the _other_ options I can use...

E.g., I have:

   $ git slog --help
   `git slog' is aliased to `log --date=short --pretty=tformat:"%h
%ad  %s" --abbrev-commit'

But the typical question I want to answer is something like "OK, how do I reverse the output order of slog?" or "how do I limit the output of slog to a certain date range?"

-miles

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