[systemd-devel] [PATCH] systemctl: Implement "info" and "doc" commands, similar to "man"

[Lennart Poettering]

On Thu, 31.05.12 13:22, Gergely Nagy (algernon at balabit.hu) wrote:

> > On Thu, 31.05.12 12:56, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek (zbyszek at in.waw.pl) wrote:
> >> On 05/31/2012 12:40 PM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> >> > I'd be open to rename "systemctl man" to "systemctl doc" too, if people
> >> > want this, if we make it cover both man and info. Not sure I like "doc"
> >> > too much though. Maybe we can find another name? Suggestions? The reason
> >> > I picked "man" in the first place is that it is kinda an obvious choice
> >> > and man is much more ubiquititous than info.
> >> 'help' seems to be used -- e.g. 'git help rebase'.
> >
> > We already have "systemctl help", which is equivalent to "systemctl
> > --help".
> >
> > I wonder though whether it would make sense to make "systemctl help"
> > with params work as before but with params take over the role of
> > "systemctl man"? Would that be confusing?
> 
> I don't think it would be. It would actually match my expectations
> (spoiled by git, I am).

OK, let's do it like this: let's rename "systemctl man" to "systemctl
help", and when somebody calls that without any arguments we show one
line that reads something like this: "This command expects one or more
unit names. Or did you mean systemctl --help?"

That way we are still helpful to users but kinda avoid the problem of
overloading one command with different meanings.

"systemctl help" would invoke "man" and "info" as necessary, but for
http/https it would just output some informational message including the
URL but not invoke xdg-open (for the reasons mentioned earlier). I think
this would be a really nice solution that should make most people happy,
feel natural, and have very few unpleasant surprises.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.