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.
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 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
