tools' --help option barely usable

[Andreas Hasenack]

Hi,

While trying to find out all the possible command line options for the
tools (like relation-get, relation-set, etc), it dawned on me that the
--help option is basically unusable.

Here are the reasons:
- the tools are not packaged, so they don't get installed when you apt-get
install juju-core
- the tools also don't get placed in $GOPATH/bin/ when you build from
source. You have to manually symlink jujud to each tool name
- even if they were installed, they don't work outside of a juju unit as
they require a *running* jujud for anything, even --help
- you can't run tools interactively on a deployed unit, again, because they
are outside of a juju context or environment
- there is no debug-hook as there was in pyjuju, so you can't run them in
that debug context either

It's silly, but the only way to get --help output from a tool is to:
- add <tool> --help to some hook in a charm
- deploy said charm
- inspect charm logs looking for the --help output

Niemeyer suggested something like this: juju help-tool <tool-name>

In that way, you can get the help output locally on your box with the
packaged version of juju-core.

In the absense of manpages for the tools, this would help a lot already.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/juju-dev/attachments/20130531/3291a431/attachment.html>