Hi Ian, ropers wrote on Sun, Jun 30, 2019 at 02:18:56PM +0200:
> In bash, `help` is a shell builtin and does do something, though IMO, > the something that it does isn't initially as helpful as OpenBSD's > help(1), especially to newbies. [1] Yes. When a user types "help", it is unlikely they are confused only about shell builtins (or even about the shell at large), but it sounds more like they need getting started with the OS as a whole. > However, what it does do, i.e. > * print a list of bash builtins in response to `help`, or > * print bash builtin-specific help in response to `help [builtin]` > could well be helpful later and relates to what we discussed earlier. > Is man(1) plus info(1) plus bash's help some kind of triple > book-keeping or wheel-reinvention? More like quadruple because there is also the usage message. But yes, that having a one- or two-line usage message on the one hand and a complete and concise manual page on the other hand, and no third copy of the same, is the current official OpenBSD position because the information isn't really that hard to find in the manual page, and a third copy would cause additional maintenance effort and risk getting outdated. All the same, developers occasionally discuss whether exceptions of having -h or --help options for a few unusually complicated programs might make sense (for example right now on tech@), but so far, it was usually rejected. > Perhaps, but in terms of convenience, bash's `help` and `help [builtin]` > are stiff competition to [...] `man -k Ic,Nm=[term]` and `man -O > tag=[term]`. Except that features like `help` and `help [builtin]` work differently for each and every program, so you can't really get used to them, neither to how to call them nor to which usually incomplete selection of information they might throw at you, whereas semantic tags work in a general and uniform way, and not only for .Ic, which is just one of many examples. > footnote: > [1] This also means that if an OpenBSD sysadmin tries to be "helpful > to newbies" by installing the bash they're maybe used to, they will by > default clobber access to OpenBSD's excellent help(1), and it would > take extra care to re-enable that and to then figure out a nice way to > still provide access to bash's builtin help too... aaargh! Maybe bash > on OpenBSD isn't the best choice really. Indeed, in particular not as a login shell. On the other hand, if a user explicitly types "bash", they get what they ask for, and there is nothing wrong with that. Yours, Ingo
