Re: git alias and --help

From: Gelonida N <gelonida@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 28, 2011, 09:17 UTC
Message-ID: <j8ds01$fc7$1@dough.gmane.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vvcr9wyje.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On 10/28/2011 06:05 AM, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> writes:
> 
>> Of course, that would be the wrong thing for somebody that just wants
>> to be reminded what an alias expands too, but my intuition is that
>> this is a very tiny minority compared to people that want to examine
>> the options for the underlying command...
> 
> And it is doubly wrong if help backend is configured to be anything but
> manpages, no?

Well. Then it is already doubly wrong today, isnt it? The output of 'git help b' is not a man page I assume.

In my opinion chaning it to a short message + the output of a man page is not really worse than today's behaviour.

> 
> As I said, you should be able to come up with a patch that detects and
> special cases the no frills case (replacement to single token) to get what
> you want.

That's perhaps the most comfortable one, though occasionally I am even interested in the help text of a git command if I had an alias like

l = log --name-status

to see what other switches I could add

(Thus an alternative suggestion to display both or to have a special syntax allowing to force displaying of a man page)

Another small detail:

Let's assume I have following alias:

log = log --name-status

In this case I directly get the help text for git log if I typed 'git log --help' (or 'git help log'). I don't even see, that my log is in reality aliased.