[Toybox] weird help spacing

[Rob Landley]

On 4/11/19 8:19 PM, enh via Toybox wrote:
> have you noticed that commands with multiple variants (like netcat)
> get fewer than normal blank lines at the end of their help, and
> commands with commented-out variants (like mount) get more than
> normal?

I had not, but I should fix that.

> rmmod actually does just have an extra blank line in the .c file. but
> tunctl and umount i can't explain at all...

Probably config2help.c. Which... When I was splicing together multiple config
options, I needed that. But I've mostly purged that, and may go all the way to
purging it, in which case it can go back to a moderately horrible sed invocation.

But in the meantime, there should probably be at most _one_ blank line at the
end of help text. (Possibly none, but I think I tried that way back when and it
looked weird? "toybox --help true" looks weird without it, but then that hasn't
got a usage: line. I should probably fix that, but it's one of the NOHELP
commands where you _have_ to use the help command (or toybox --help) to see its
help text.)

Speaking of which, the "man" command is one of them unresolved design things. I
don't have anything that can display external man pages, but given that back
before ESR went nuts I was involved with doclifter and the attempt to convert
Linux help text to modern online formats (we got a committment from the FSF to
migrate all their gopher-derived info nonsense to html! When they then forgot
and started once again viciously defending their homegrown not-invented-here
format because it was _theirs_ and... sigh.)

*shrug* Michael Kerrisk has man7.org with html versions of all the man pages he
maintains (which is all the standard Linux ones), back when I maintained
kernel.org/doc (2007) I had https://kernel.org/doc/Documentation for the
Documentation directory and https://kernel.org/doc/htmldocs for the "make
htmldocs" output (extracted from the doxygen-ish annotations in the source) and
I had a https://www.kernel.org/doc/menuconfig which went away because I lost the
ability to update it when kernel.org got hacked and they forced everybody's ssh
access through gitolite so I couldn't rsync the web pages anymore and konstantin
ignored my http://landley.net/hg/kdocs and never ran the python script to
regenerate it. There's an old copy in my staging directory at
https://landley.net/kdocs/menuconfig/ if you're curious what that _used_ to look
like. _I_ thought it was useful. Oh well...

Anyway, one of the many balls I used to juggle back when the kernel development
community hadn't disappeared up its own ass, but I can't say I'm _surprised_ it
happened, can I?

2013: https://www.zdnet.com/article/graying-linux-developers-look-for-new-blood/
2017: https://thenewstack.io/growing-new-linux-kernel-developers/

Expect the next such article in 2021 I suppose...

How's Fuchsia coming along? :)

Rob