Subject: Re: git alias and --help

From: Gelonida N <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2011 11:17:52 +0200

On 10/28/2011 06:05 AM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Miles Bader <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
>> 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...
> 
> And it is doubly wrong if help backend is configured to be anything but
> manpages, no?

Well. Then it is already doubly wrong today, isnt it?
The output of 'git help b'
is not a man page I assume.

In my opinion chaning it to a short message + the output of a man page
is not really worse than today's behaviour.

> 
> As I said, you should be able to come up with a patch that detects and
> special cases the no frills case (replacement to single token) to get what
> you want.

That's perhaps the most comfortable one, though occasionally I am even
interested in the help text of a git command if I had an alias like

l = log --name-status

to see what other switches I could add

(Thus an alternative suggestion to display both or to have a special
syntax allowing to force displaying of a man page)

Another small detail:

Let's assume I have following alias:

log = log --name-status

In this case I directly get the help text for git log
if I typed 'git log --help' (or 'git help log').
I don't even see, that my log is in reality aliased.