[Toybox] Grinding away at a release.

[enh]

On Sun, Jun 4, 2017 at 9:43 PM, Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
> I meant to get one out on the first, but have a nasty cold (the person I
> got it from had it all last week, it's a fun one).
>
> The main delay is that I did a lot of work on
> https://github.com/landley/mkroot over the past week, which depends on
> the toybox release happening first (right now
> http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/mkroot-landley.net/2017-May/000015.html
> is its #1 FAQ). Next time around I should have the toybox test suite
> running under that and doing root tests, but this time around I'm just
> getting around to working on the release notes.
>
> Commit d3267c60ee48 which Elliot wanted still troubles me: that's the
> one that stopped outputting help text for things like:
>
>   $ ./ls -X
>   ls: Unknown option X
>
> The problem is, if you don't already know to type --help there's no
> indication where to go next.
>
> I'm  thinking of changing help_exit() to say something like "Run 'ls
> --help' for more info." and then switching most of the lib/args.c calls
> back to help_exit().

that sounds reasonable to me (though i shudder slightly at the idea
that there are people out there who don't just automatically try
--help next). two lines of output for a typo is reasonable. 40 lines
isn't.

maybe a dummy "man" that just passes --help to the relevant command
wouldn't be useless? not sure what the ratio is of folks who know "X
--help" to those who know "man X".

in my personal experience the bigger problem -- one that's actually
been reported by various people for various commands -- is that --help
doesn't actually show you all the help. worst of all, it's broken
specifically for those complicated enough for the help to have been
broken up for inheritance. i've yet to have a "i don't know how to get
help" bug report. just "the help is missing" or "please add [something
that's actually there, but the help text doesn't mention]".

> Rob
>
> P.S. Release notes are an important part of the development process
> because it means I review the development we did over the past few
> months and confirm it makes _sense_. It's yet another layer of
> code/design review. Alas right now I'm a little less coherent than I'd
> like due to this cold...
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-- 
Elliott Hughes - http://who/enh - http://jessies.org/~enh/
Android native code/tools questions? Mail me/drop by/add me as a reviewer.