To me help should be optimized for the common case. The common case would be that the user is only interested in a small segment of the available commands. So I would do it the other way around: Let help show the most common ones and add something like --help-full which displays all commands.
I still (strongly at that) disagree, a "normal" user might still want to use some infrequently use command, infact, that is why you use --help to begin with, you don't remeber a _infrequently_ used command, or the syntax for it. If it was common, then you wouldn't be issuing --help! :-) You wouldn't want tar' --help to only list --create, --versbose, --extract and --file now would you? The default behaviour for --help should always be to list all non-deprected commands, in my not so humble opinion. And for new users, they really should read a manual that shows the most common commands, which then builds up to the less common ones. As a quickreference for those, --quick-reference, --help=common, --help=ref or something could be used. But as a default... Icky. You use --help to get info on those things you don't remeber. In other words, the common case for using --help is to get a listing on infrequently used commands, and not frequently used ones. _______________________________________________ Gnu-arch-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-arch-users GNU arch home page: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnu-arch/
