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
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