Ben Coburn <[email protected]> writes:

>> Actually, I guess I feel that it should be possible to tell what the
>> "common" options are by looking at the ones that have a short option
>> (-f as well as --foo).  How would people feel about a single option
>> list per command, and sorting it?
>
> I think that most of us only use 3-4 options regularly for any given
> command, through this varies per-person. Darcs is simple and easy to
> use, however the options lists can be overwhelming to a new user. I
> think we should continue to divide the lists of options into "common"
> and "less commonly" used options. The trouble with relying on short
> names is that not all "common" options have short names (--dry-run,
> etc...).

I would (tentatively) argue that the actual bug in that case is that
--dry-run doesn't have a short option.

> I don't think the list should be sorted alphabetically. It is more
> important to group options that are *semantically* related together.
> For example, --union, --intersection, --compliment, should all be
> listed next to each other!

Hmm; I suppose it's always easier for the user to sort it (darcs help |
sort) than to un-sort it (i.e. go back to the semantically ordered
version)!

>> For example, "darcs pull --help" would have the following.  I already
>> have an (ugly) patch to sort the options.  Perhaps we should also
>> simplify things by compressing the --foo and --no-foo or --dont-foo
>> options, e.g. "--[no-]foo".  Incidentally, why do we have both --no
>> and --dont prefixes?!
>
> Yes, I think we should compress negated options to --[no-]foo and --
> [dont-]foo. Hopefully, this will make the options list visually easier
> to read. The descriptions should probably be all for the positive
> version of these options.

Reported to the BTS as http://bugs.darcs.net/issue1291.

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