[RFC] Concise vs comprehensive help - do we need both?

[Marius Gedminas]

On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 07:04:51PM +1100, Ben Finney wrote:
> Ian Clatworthy <ian.clatworthy at internode.on.net> writes:
> 
> > I'd be just as happy not adding -? and making -h be concise help
> > while "bzr help xxx" gave the full story. Would that be better?
> 
> I would expect ‘-h’ and ‘--help’ to be synonymous, and to default to
> concise help.
> 
> Multi-page verbosity should not be something associated with a
> commonly-used option like ‘--help’, but rather something that
> indicates it's verbose, such as ‘--help --verbose’ or ‘--help --long’.

This makes most sense to me, especially if the short help page mentions
the existence of the long one.

  $ bzr help merge
  Purpose: ...
  Usage: ...
  Options:
    ...

  See bzr help -v merge for more details and examples.

Marius Gedminas
-- 
Some people around here wouldn't recognize
subtlety if it hit them on the head.
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