[PATCH 0 of 2] Verbose help

[Martin Geisler]

Greg Ward <greg-hg at gerg.ca> writes:

> 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 was thinking of the --expert flag as a "I'm done with the training
wheels" flag, but now that I re-read it, I also think it looks odd :-)

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

Yeah, that sounds useful and it shouldn't be hard to remember the
container types that were pruned.

> 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.

That would be fine with me. I'm quite busy until the middle of next
week, so feel free to discuss this further until then :-)

> 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?

I just browsed their source and was unable to find anything about
different verbosity levels. Do you have a link?

-- 
Martin Geisler

VIFF (Virtual Ideal Functionality Framework) brings easy and efficient
SMPC (Secure Multiparty Computation) to Python. See: http://viff.dk/.
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