At Tue, 11 Jan 2005 18:29:43 +0100, Alfred M Szmidt wrote: > Come to think of it, this isn't a bug. Most if not all GNU programs > work like this, consider ls: > > ~ $ ls -l RMAIL --help > usage: ls [OPTION]... [FILE]... > List information about the FILEs (the current directory by default). > Sort entries alphabetically across.
Most programs don't support dynamically loadable plugins. In particular, ls doesn't. But there is a point in not changing the behaviour of --help, because of the behaviour to just add --help to a complete command line to see the help without running the program (it saves some keystrokes). However, in that case, there'd be need a new option --plugin-help or so, which shows the plugin options. That said, I don't think that just reusing --help and --version is too confusing, given that you have to know about the -d option in the first place to get into this tricky situation, and the documentation for the -d option must say clearly that subsequent options relate to the plugin, and not the main program. That same documentation can also say that all plugins accept at least two options, --help and --version, and then there is no ambiguity. Thanks, Marcus _______________________________________________ Bug-hurd mailing list Bug-hurd@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-hurd
