On 4-Feb-08, at 4:20 PM, Dan Fabulich wrote:
Jason van Zyl wrote:
I'm not saying the CLI is a good option. I think it's a bad option.
Keep this out of the core. It's perfectly fine as a plugin.
I'll throw in my two cents and point out that while I basically
agree with this, I don't think the help plugin is adequately
documented by the software right now.
I agree, I think what Vincent made would be great where it was just
auto generated and stuffed into the plugin so that "mvn foo:help" just
works. It will take a while for all plugins to have this but I don't
think it's that big a deal.
That is, I think some other command line tools (notably svn) are
pretty easy to learn using just the command line. You start with
"svn help"; it gives you a list of commands you can use, and
suggests that you type "svn help <subcommand>" for more help on a
specific command.
Right now, "mvn --help" gives you a list of command line switches,
but no commands to run, not even a suggestion that you might want to
use the help plugin.
It would be easy to modify the "--help" text to mention the help
plugin, and maybe that's enough. But I think we could at least make
a very simple "help" lifecycle phase that's bound to "help:describe"
by default. That would make "mvn help" a synonym for "mvn help:describe
".
I think this would be pretty useful if we also did some more work on
the Maven help plugin, which is surprisingly tricky to use. I just
filed about half a dozen new JIRA issues on it today that suggest
some ways it could be easier to use and work with.
For example, I could imagine the user typing "mvn
help:describe" (or, eventually, just "mvn help") and getting a nice
description of how the help plugin works. Then they could use that
to learn more about Maven, perhaps investigating a particular plugin
goal with "mvn help -Dcmd=idea:idea", or get a list of goals in a
plugin with "mvn help -Dplugin=idea", or learn about the lifecycle
with "mvn help:lifecycle".
The core and the CLI calling to a wrapper for something housed in a
plugin is not a good idea.
+1.
-Dan
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Thanks,
Jason
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Jason van Zyl
Founder, Apache Maven
jason at sonatype dot com
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A party which is not afraid of letting culture,
business, and welfare go to ruin completely can
be omnipotent for a while.
-- Jakob Burckhardt
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