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man pagesman pagesPosted Sep 5, 2008 23:29 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)In reply to: man pages by pj Parent article: Feature removal sparks Git flamewar
I've always thought it was pretty cool that 'git foo --help' would pull up the man page. Yay unix! As a workaround by git develoeprs for the fact that you can't use the more logical command, 'help git foo', maybe. It's actually counter-Unix, as the Unix tradition is for --help to give you something more brief than a man page. And the Unix one-program-one-function rule says if you want to display a man page, you should invoke the man page displayer program, not the SCM access program. (That gives you the power to choose the man page displayer, etc.).
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man pages Posted Sep 6, 2008 14:54 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
> It's actually counter-Unix, as the Unix tradition is for --help to give you something more brief than a man page.
Absolutely true. It would be nice if each Git page started with a good synopsis and maybe a few examples. If those don't answer your questions, you can keep reading.
> And the Unix one-program-one-function rule says if you want to display a man page, you should invoke the man page displayer program, not the SCM access program.
This is only true for typical medium-complexity tools. Man is simply insufficient for more complex programs (most other scms, gdb, etc). At least Git still uses man! gdb and svn require you to use a different reader entirely.
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