Re: [Monotone-devel] nvm.options

[Stephen Leake]

Thomas Keller <address@hidden> writes:

> Am 23.07.10 10:42, schrieb Stephen Leake:

>> This would be easier if the manpage code was merged into this branch.
>> And that may have to be tweaked for this anyway, so we should wait to
>> land this until after the manpage branch lands.
>
> Actually this would not help much, because the code in this branch
> specifically outputs man format, not texinfo which we'd actually need.

I meant it would be nice to have the man page available while doing this
work, because it's easier to search in a man page than in the current
output. Moot point now, since I've done it.

> If we however have several use cases for structured help output, like
> generating a man page dynamically from it, including it in the texinfo
> manual and maybe even use it for the zsh / bash completion scripts in
> a generic way, then maybe a general "dump command tree" command would
> indeed be more suitable. But what format should that use? XML? JSON?
> YAML? basicio? All these formats have their pros and cons, XML being
> the most versatile esp. when XSLT is used, but neither format is easy
> to process in shell scripts.

I would not try to pick a "universal" output format. For texinfo
fragment output, I'd just write more C++ code, hopefully reusing much of
your man page generation code. Using C++ container operations to walk
the command/option tree, dispatching to an output function at each node,
makes the most sense. Note that the texinfo fragments go in separate
files; I doubt other applications will want separate files.

But I suppose there will be people that want to write new code in Python
instead of C++, and they could use XML output.

> I'm open for suggestions. Depending on the amount of work this would
> introduce I tend to put this task after 0.99/1.0 though.

Definitely.

-- 
-- Stephe