[PATCH 0 of 2] Verbose help

[Greg Ward]

On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 5:03 PM, Martin Geisler <mg at lazybytes.net> wrote:
> Even the idea of verbose help is a bit odd -- perhaps we should turn it
> upside down? So we enable all the detailed help and examples by default,
> but if one does
>
>  hg --expert help log
>
> then we hide the help meant for beginners. Experts can then set
> ui.expert = True in their hgrc file. Just a thought...?

Huh?  That seems backwards.  I would have thought

  hg help x

would give the basic help on x, and

  hg help --expert x

would show everything.  I like Peter's idea of adding "use hg help
--expert x for more information" if topic x has higher level help.

Also, now that you mention it, I think it should be called "expert
help" rather than "verbose" or "debug".  That just makes much more
sense in the context of a help system.  (Consider GUIs that hide
advanced menu items by default: the usual terminology is "expert mode"
to show everything.)  We could make -v/--verbose have the same effect
as --expert, but I think the term should be "expert", right down to
the markup.

Incidentally, Bazaar does something similar to generate their
reference manual from the same source as the online help.  Have you
looked at what they do?

Greg