https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=68043
Bug ID: 68043 Summary: many undocumented options, missing punctuation Product: gcc Version: 6.0 Status: UNCONFIRMED Severity: enhancement Priority: P3 Component: driver Assignee: unassigned at gcc dot gnu.org Reporter: msebor at gcc dot gnu.org Target Milestone: --- As discussed in the thread at the link below, gcc's online help (the output of gcc --help -v) includes a large number of undocumented options (197 in 5.1.0). For example, the section listing language-related options starts with the following and 44 or so more undocumented options: The following options are language-related: --all-warnings This switch lacks documentation --ansi This switch lacks documentation --assert This switch lacks documentation ... All of the options in the section above and a good number of others are synonyms for other options that are, in fact, documented. This bug tracks an enhancement to use this "aliasing" knowledge to avoid printing "This switch lacks documentation" for such options and improve the experience using the compiler. In addition, as was also noted in the mailing list discussion, many of the one-sentence descriptions of the options are not properly ended with a period, making printing additional (generated) sentences difficult. To make that possible, the other aspect of this bug is to track fixing the sources of the descriptions (i.e., the various .opt files) to properly terminate each sentence. https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2015-10/msg01395.html