[Toybox] help text

[Rob Landley]

On 1/31/20 2:54 PM, enh wrote:
> so, yeah, reality is a mess. but since all of toybox is in one
> executable, it seems odd for us not to be consistent.

No point implementing the command line again if we can't do a better job. :)

> running
> 
>   for i in $(busybox --list); do busybox $i --help 2>&1 | grep Usage: ; done
> 
> and then eyeballing the list shows that busybox manages to
> consistently use capitals.

I'm all for consistently using capitals in the help text.

These days there's FLAG() macros, I consistently use GLOBAL variable names that
are the same as the option that populates them, the usage: line isn't
capitalized, there should be a comment above the NEWTOY() when the order of
flags matters because the parse logic's being fiddly... (And I don't alphebetize
options in there so much as group similar types together so I can have fewer
variable declaration lines...)

There should probably be a documentation section on all this, just dunno if it's
in code.html, design.html, FAQ.html, cleanup.html... (Maybe there should be a
docs.html I try to shuffle all of it into? Hmmm...)

> (btw, am i the only one who thinks the busybox --list output format is
> more useful than the toybox one?)

toybox hasn't got a --list, it treats any unrecognized -- as --long. (Leftover
from back in the days I was trying to squeeze out every byte and going "the
multiplexer is in every command". I should probably fix that since "simple"
implying "consistent" has risen above "small" in the goal list. Assuming the
change won't break somebody's install script...)

Note that "busybox --help" and "busybox" produce the same output, but "toybox
--help" and "toybox" don't. The busybox without arguments version is
gratuitously hard to parse; it's got --help info followed by a list with commas
which screw up "for i in $(toybox); do echo $i; done" even if you chop off the
right magic number of leading lines.

I explained this to Denys when I met him in person at CELF in 2010
(http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-April/072078.html) and he added
a --list that produced script consumable output saying in the commit comment it
was because I asked him to:

  https://git.busybox.net/busybox/commit/?id=5a7c72015c05

Space vs newline is the same as far as most consumers are concerned (the above
for loop doesn't care), and fitting more on the screen seemed easier on humans
to me?

That said, adding a "type --help" prompt to "toybox walrus" might be useful, or
just specifically checking for long so "toybox --list" tells you to run "toybox
--help". (If you really want --list to be ignored and thus produce the
toybox-with-no-args output, I can do that? Or do you think the one command per
line version is superior...?)

>> Rob

Still Rob