Feature proposal: ghc --full-flag-help ?

[Seth Kurtzberg]

No disagreement; the text man page should also be a file in the distribution with a name that suggests its contents.

On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:18:20 +0000
Simon Marlow <simonmarhaskell at gmail.com> wrote:

> Marc Weber wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 01:57:10PM +0100, Marc Weber wrote:
> >> Hi
> >>
> >> I did notice a lot of times that I just didn't remember the name of
> >> option X. How to look it up? Walk through html or pdf documentation?
> > 
> > Just printing a link to ghc online docs is not enough because:
> >   * maybe no internet availible
> >   * internet slow?
> >   * You still need to search/ scroll (too much effort)
> >   * getting help on flags is default behaviour of any linux application
> >     and most haskell developers are working on this os I think.
> >     Have you ever tried  info bash, info grep, info whatsoever and got
> >     the result "please visit http:// .. ?
> >     That's like invoking ghc printing "This is only a fake. Please
> >     execute realghc instead"
> > 
> > I'd love to implement this. But I might need some time.
> > I already know where to start (hacking on ghc intro on the ghc
> > documentation site .. ;-)
> > 
> > How should it look like?
> 
> We already have support for man pages, I think we should try to avoid 
> duplication here.  If your GHC man page is installed correctly, then 'man ghc' 
> should give you a nice consise list of options (see attached file, and scripts 
> in docs/man in a GHC tree).
> 
> So I think if we are to have a 'ghc --full-help' then it should just output the 
> man page, as Ketil suggested.  But we should make this work and output the 
> correct man page regardless of whether 'man ghc' works, because you might have 
> multiple GHC versions installed, and/or the system might not even have a man 
> command (Windows).  So every GHC installation should include a text version of 
> the man page, that should be fairly easy to arrange.
> 
> Cheers,
> 	Simon
> 
>