[Toybox] --help annoyance

[enh]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 11:59 AM Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
>
> On 10/18/2018 01:12 PM, enh wrote:
> > Yeah, my assumption was that as long as I'm still in the flags, --help should
> > work. (But not *anywhere*.)
>
> Most commands never _stop_ accepting flags:
>
>   ls file file file -l
>   rm file file file -i
>
> lib/args.c has ^ to stop at the first non-option argument, and
>
> $ grep 'TOY(.*\^.*)' toys/*/*.c -l | wc -l
>      22
> $ grep 'TOY([^^]*)' toys/*/*.c -l | wc -l
>     224
>
> About 1/10th of the commands use it. (Hence every command accepting -- and the
> old argument about whether echo should.)
>
> > Personally, I often just add --help on the end of what I've already typed if I
> > get stuck.
> >
> > For this specific case, I think in my ideal world, a flag that takes arguments
> > from a list should probably show that list any time it gets something it doesn't
> > understand? But I don't think this is a regression, so I don't think it makes
> > sense to try to rush something into this release.
>
> Weren't you the guy who wanted "see --help" instead of dumping help text all the
> time? :)

was i? i remember being the guy who wanted "(see --help)" rather than
nothing, because i kept getting bug reports from folks who didn't even
know there _was_ help.

> So far I think I've only got a list dumper in ps. There's stuff like kill -l and
> getconf -l that does it too, but that's an option to show the list...
>
> But yeah, accepting --help as well as "help" makes sense...
>
> Rob