man pages [LWN.net]

man pages

Posted Sep 4, 2008 13:16 UTC (Thu) by pj (subscriber, #4506)
In reply to: man pages by mp
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!

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man pages

Posted Sep 5, 2008 23:29 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

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.).

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.