Re: Online Help

[Marcus Brinkmann <Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de>]

On Fri, Dec 28, 2001 at 10:00:51AM -0700, Chris Tillman wrote:
> However, some commands don't respond to this, others act as if the
> --help was not present and do their function anyway. That violates the
> don't-surprise-your-user software quality guideline, when so many
> packages conform to the unwritten 'standard'.

Annoying, but we can probably not help it.  For some programs, there is a
historic reason they behave the way they do.  For others, we might be in
trouble if the upstream authors disagrees.  We would behave different than
in other systems, which also breaks another kind of expectation.

By the way, this standard is not unwritten.  It is the GNU coding standard
which mandates --help, --version and a lot of other good stuff.

I completely agree with you about what's desirable, but I am afraid you can
only try to push this idea at the upstream maintainers.

BTW, just a small point:

> Programs which can be executed from the Linux console

Mind your wording.  Linux is just the kernel of the Debian GNU/Linux system.
Even GNU/Linux wouldn't be correct here, as there are other kernels, like
the Hurd.

I also don't think the restriction to 24 lines makes any sense, but it
should print the help output at stdout, so you can easily pipe it to your
pager.  GNU programs also print usage (--usage) information at error
(to stderr) or at --usage (to stdout).

Thanks,
marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann              GNU    http://www.gnu.org    marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de