Subject: Re: git alias and --help

From: Miles Bader <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:51:56 +0900

Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]> writes:
>>> git branch --help
>>
>> How about "git help branch"?
>
> The reason why we do not do what you seem to be suggesting is because
> giving the same behaviour to "git b --help" as "git branch --help" is
> wrong.

I agree with Gelonida's followup:  although what you say makes sense,
it's still pretty annoying behavior for the very common case of a
simple renaming alias...

E.g., I have "co" aliased to "checkout", and so my fingers are very
very inclined to say "co" when I mean checkout... including when
asking for help.  I actually end up typing "git co --help", grumbling,
and retyping with the full command name, quite reguarly.

What I've often wished is that git's help system would output
something like:

   $ git help co
   `git co' is aliased to `checkout'

   Here's the help entry for `checkout':

   GIT-CHECKOUT(1)                   Git Manual                   GIT-CHECKOUT(1)

   NAME
          git-checkout - Checkout a branch or paths to the working tree
   ...

[with the "`git co' is aliased ..." header included in the pager
output.]

Of course, that would be the wrong thing for somebody that just wants
to be reminded what an alias expands too, but my intuition is that
this is a very tiny minority compared to people that want to examine
the options for the underlying command...

-Miles

-- 
Suburbia: where they tear out the trees and then name streets after them.