Re: [PATCH] help: make option --help open man pages only for Git commands

From: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org>
Date: Aug 13, 2016, 00:08 UTC
Message-ID: <F3BA479B58944083A62896E2F0504D48@PhilipOakley>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq1t1tvbu8.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

From: "Junio C Hamano" <gitster@pobox.com>
To: "Ralf Thielow" <ralf.thielow@gmail.com>
Cc: <git@vger.kernel.org>; <larsxschneider@gmail.com>; <me@jnm2.com>
Sent: Friday, August 12, 2016 11:53 PM
Subject: Re: [PATCH] help: make option --help open man pages only for Git 
commands

Show 20 quoted lines

> Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:
>
>> I love it when I say "This shouldn't be too hard; somebody may want
>> to do a patch", with just a vague implemention idea in my head, and
>> a patch magically appears with even a better design than I had in
>> mind when I said it [*1*] ;-)
>
> Having said that, I wonder if we could do a bit better.
>
>    $ git -c help.autocorrect=1 whatchange --help
>    WARNING: You called a Git command named 'whatchange', which does not 
> exist.
>    Continuing under the assumption that you meant 'whatchanged'
>    in 0.1 seconds automatically...
>    No manual entry for gitwhatchange
>
> We are guessing that the user meant "whatchanged"; shouldn't we be
> able to feed the corrected name of the command to the machinery to
> drive the manpage viewer?
>

But does it cope with the Guides? Should it cope if spelt that way?

git help revisions git revisions --help

I suspect that the former should work, but not the latter, as a reasonable approach. I just haven't checked.

The other moderately low hanging fruit is to do the (full) list of guides as part of 'help'.

Philip