On Sat, 2011-02-19 at 11:39 +1100, Ben Finney wrote: > Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> writes: > > > In article <slrnilu2e0.15e.grahn+n...@frailea.sa.invalid>, > > Jorgen Grahn <grahn+n...@snipabacken.se> wrote: > > > > > On Thu, 2011-02-17, Roy Smith wrote: > > > > These days, user documentation for me means good help text for > > > > argparse to use. > > > > > > Perhaps I'm old-fashioned, but all other software I use (on Unix) > > > has man pages. I /expect/ there to be one. (It's not hard to write a > > > man page either, if you have a decent one as a template.) > > > > The nice thing about help text is that it keeps the documentation and > > the code in one place, which makes it a little more likely people will > > actually update the docs as they update the code. > > Yes, that's nice for the programmer. But isn't the point of the man page > to be nice for the users? The man pages document many more things than > help text output from the program. > > -- > \ “Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not | > `\ happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these | > _o__) defects.” —Mark Twain, _A Horse's Tale_ | > Ben Finney
From what I've seen, the man pages are supposed to be in depth information that covers every nook and cranny of every option while the --help option is supposed to simply print a summary in case one forgets the syntax, but nowadays they've kind of been blended together. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list