[Nagiosplug-devel] Extra opts help text
Olivier 'Babar' Raginel
nagios at babar.us
Thu Apr 22 10:24:00 CEST 2010
On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 08:52:31AM +0100, Ton Voon wrote:
> Exceeds the 80-character limit that we usually enforce on --help
> output.
>
> From dev guidelines: "Code and output should try to respect the 80x25
> size of a crt (remember when fixing stuff in the server room!)"
> I think the 80 char limit is a bit too conservative in this day and age
> (would you read a plugin help output on a terminal in a server room?),
> so I'd say some higher limit, say, 132 chars. But I guess that's just
> some other arbitrary number too.
>
> Any opinions? In any event, I think I'll change the dev guidelines to
> remove the "server room" comment.
It's not only server room. I often have my screen filled up with 80 cols
width terminals. Yes, I could have one big and use screen or something
similar, or one of those tabbed terminals, but I doubt I'm the only one
working like that.
80 columns are still good, and not only for server room.
So, I would say either you want to stick to 80 chars, or you go all the
way and implement some clever mechanism.
What I would vote for is to put everything in man pages. Yes, this will
deroute windows users, but man pages / pod were invented exactly for
this.
On the implementation side, this would mean splitting the documentation
and the code, at least for C programs, and I agree this might not be a
good thing. So one alternative would be to add some step to the release
process which would strip out the --help text and put it inside a
manpage, and replace the --help output with some dummy text, such as:
Please read the man pages for $0, using: man $0
--
Babar - from the 90's :)
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