Jason van Zyl wrote:
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.
It seems to me that putting a hook in core has considerable advantage over autogenerated copies of code in every plugin. Some plugins have such slow release cycles, or in some cases (e.g. xdoclet-maven-plugin) are almost dead, but still used. So, if a plugin has to rebuilt to integrate the feature, some plugins are never going to get the feature.
As a result the user experience will be patchy, with the beginner's impression being that the help command spuriously fails in some cases for no apparent reason.
The problem would be ongoing, too - after any update to the autogenerated code, stale versions will linger for a long time.
A special syntax in the core CLI mapping onto a help plugin invocation would nicely dodge the whole "re-release the world" issue whilst still allowing the implementation of the help display to be updated independently of core.
What's the disadvantage to that? Max.
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