[RFC] Condense help listings

Matthew D. Fuller fullermd at over-yonder.net
Sat Sep 30 13:29:36 BST 2006


On Sun, Sep 24, 2006 at 12:12:10PM -0400 I heard the voice of
Aaron Bentley, and lo! it spake thus:
> John Arbash Meinel wrote:
> > I wonder about changing it to:
> > 
> > baz-import <bzrtools> Import an Arch or Baz...
> 
> I thought the description would be the most interesting thing for
> people, most of the time, so I stuck the plugin at the end.
> 
> > And probably (bzrtools) might be nicer. So I'm happy with the
> > single line entries, it makes things look less cluttered.
> 
> Parentheses are used in regular command descriptions, so I thought
> that would be confusing.  Perhaps "[bzrtools]"?

I wonder if it mightn't be cleaner to list all the builtin commands,
then all the plugins under a heading.  Something like:

-----------------------
version          Show version of bzr.
version-info     Generate version information about this tree.
whoami           Show or set bzr user id.

>From plugin fooblaz:
arglefarx        Twitznatz the blertlegitz with the parent branch.
zrekniz          Frundle branch nitzschen.
-----------------------

Sticking the plugin name in between the command and description seems
like it would tend to lead to really long leaders on the lines, and at
the 'end' of the line (or the line after) might be a little easy to
miss.  Of course, there are advantages to having everything together
in alphabetical (or lexical) order...


-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.




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