[PATCH 0 of 2] Verbose help

[Peter Arrenbrecht]

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 9:00 PM, Greg Ward <greg-hg at gerg.ca> wrote:
> 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.

I think we have too different needs to hide information: --expert
should turn on advanced topics, --verbose should turn on more examples
and hints to beginners. And maybe --full would turn on everything.

I would personally like to keep the basic help as it is (actually,
shorten it somewhat) for quick reference, but --quiet is too terse for
me, as it does not list options.

-parren