[RFC] bzr help plugin-name

[Robert Collins]

On Mon, 2006-06-19 at 10:37 -0500, John Arbash Meinel wrote:
> Robert Collins wrote:
> > I think it would be nice if 'bzr help <pluginname>' were to show the
> > docstring from the plugin. This would allow plugins that introduce a
> > number of commands to have a single place to give conceptual guidance
> > and help - one that users can be taught how to predict.
> > 
> > Rob
> 
> This goes back into having plugins export a 'canonical' name. Otherwise
> I may work like mpe and have 01_shelf, or bzrtools-baz2bzr, or
> bzrtools-lifeless, etc.

They already have a canonical name - documented in the plugin loader
code IIRC. Its 'bzrlib.plugins.pluginname'. In python 2.5 it may be
reasonable to relax this and have plugins do their internal imports
relatively, but I think thats not helpful, because plugins should be
accessible to other plugins - if I have a plugin 'guisupport', I should
be able to do 'import bzrlib.plugins.guisupport' in 'bzrk'. Currently we
dont have that, because I have not written an import hook for
'bzrlib.plugins' yet - but I should do that - we can make our plugin
importer much nicer :).

> But I agree, it would be nice to have 'bzr help pluginname'.
> Maybe 'bzr help plugins.<pluginname>' to disambiguate for plugins that
> export commands of the same name.
> 
> Or 'bzr help --plugin <pluginname>' or 'bzr help plugin <pluginname>'
> 
> I probably like the last one the most.

I'm fine with the last one, but prefer 'bzr help <pluginname>' with 'bzr
help plugin <pluginname>' as an additional syntax people can use if they
need to disambiguate.

Rob


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