Re: Custom subcommand help handlers

From: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date: Dec 20, 2021, 22:54 UTC
Message-ID: <YcEJtOknDjSgxK5j@camp.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To: <CA+JQ7M8oxzUAkw-Nv4X+3bJt7cBhsUaqFKd67Y=LNLnv2kgM+Q@mail.gmail.com>

On 2021-12-20 at 12:37:26, Erik Cervin Edin wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> It looks like any git cmd --help is transformed into
> "git help --exclude-guides cmd"
> This is used to differentiate "git cmd --help" and "git help cmd".
> 
> It's used with aliases to print the alias as well as execute "git help cmd"
> Maybe something similar can be done for non built-ins that are missing
> man-pages / html-docs

I don't know that you can effectively distinguish whether there's documentation for man. It isn't guaranteed that it will exit differently if the page is missing versus if it encountered an error.

One thought I have is that on some Unix systems, you can use MANPATH to set a list of directories in which to search for manual pages. Maybe there's a standard environment variable that I'm not aware of that would provide a similar functionality.

I should point out that in most cases on Unix, it _is_ expected that you install your manual pages into the same place as everyone else, so in this case, installing the HTML documentation alongside Git's may be the best solution.

-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Toronto, Ontario, CA