[Toybox] Grinding away at a release.

[Rob Landley]

On 06/05/2017 12:53 AM, enh wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 4, 2017 at 9:43 PM, Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
>> 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.

Newbies will always be with us. If the group of people who will learn
this in future _don't_ vastly outnumber the current userbase, we're
doing it wrong. (Especially post Moore's law.)

> 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".

Alas man parses a specific legacy input format which packages provide,
so a dummy man that _doesn't_ understand that format blocks an
implementation that does. (It's on the todo list, but a ways down. Maybe
it could handoff for unknown commands but that's edge case city.)

I already implemented "help" which is the shell builtin version of man
that nobody seems to know about. Before --help you typed "help time" and
toybox gave help. (So does bash for that command.)

> 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.

I'm aware of that. I have a widow open to work on it. It's one of the
things that's been holding up the release.

> 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]".

There is a half-assed solution: copy the help text redundantly into the
individual commands. I may do that for this release and fix it up
properly when I can.

(I have a window open to work on it, but I have a nasty cold, Japanese
class in 45 minutes, $DAYJOB doing something else entirely these days,
and getting mkroot into releasable shape at a lot of my spare time this
month.)

Are there any commands other than "top" people have been complaining
about a lot?

Rob