On Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 12:32 PM, Julian Foad <[email protected]> wrote: ... > But this all does make me wonder, what problem are you really trying to > solve, and is making 'svn' pipe stdout to a pager the best way of solving it? > > You mentioned you'd be happy with just 'help' being paged. Well, maybe > that's because 'svn help merge' is really a manual but we haven't written it > as a man page; and 'svn help foo' usually ends with a screenful of options > which probably isn't what the user primarily needs to see in most cases, and > so on. >
I agree. Why don't we focus on solving the 'svn help' problem. That seems to be the issue that triggered this entire discussion. And it's becoming a very complex discussion with many different preferences and knobs ... I too get often annoyed by 'svn help foo' if it contains too much output. In 99% cases when I invoke 'svn help foo' I just want to see the usage message (and perhaps a concise list of options), because I don't remember the exact syntax. I don't want an entire manual. So how about making 'svn help foo' very concise and have 'svn help foo --verbose' give you the long version (with or without pager)? The concise version can end with a message "run 'svn help foo --verbose' for more". -- Johan
