Re: (man|info) pages and --help

[Micah Cowan]

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C de-Avillez wrote:
> So. Would it be an acceptable idea to add, to the '--help', a warning
> that this is *not* the full documentation?
> 
> Say, like:
> 
> "This is an abridged documentation. The full documentation for blahblah
> is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the info and date programs are
> properly installed at your site, the command
> 
>               info coreutils 'blahblah invocation'
> 
>        should give you access to the complete manual."

Is there anyone who's unaware that --help doesn't provide complete
documentation? I can't think of any program that provides complete
document via --help; the closest is software like Subversion, Git or
Mercurial, where they provide you access to extensive documentation via
"svn help <command>"-style inquiries. Indeed, the whole point behind
- --help is usually to generate very brief usage information. Though a
shorter, one-sentence message directing the user to the full Texinfo
documentation could be useful.

- --
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer.
Maintainer of GNU Wget and GNU Teseq
http://micah.cowan.name/
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