Before this patch, there is no information about whether help document
is fully displayed or not.
So, some users seem to misunderstand "-v" for "hg help" just as "the
option to show list of global options": experience on "hg help -v" for
some commands not containing verbose containers may strengthen this
misunderstanding.
Such users have less opportunity for noticing omitted help document,
and this may cause insufficient understanding about Mercurial.
This patch indicates help omitting, if help document is not fully
displayed.
For command help, the message below is displayed at the end of help
output, if help document is not fully displayed:
use "hg -v help xxxx" to show more complete help and the global
options
and otherwise:
use "hg -v help xxxx" to show the global options
For topics and extensions help, the message below is displayed, only
if help document is not fully displayed:
use "hg help -v xxxx" to show more complete help
This allows users to know whether there is any omitted information or
not exactly, and can trigger "hg help -v" invocation.
This patch causes formatting help document twice, to switch messages
one for omitted help, and another for not omitted. This decreases
performance of help document formatting, but it is not mainly focused
at help command invocation, so this wouldn't become problem.
The "worst" extension still is the one tested with the lowest tested version
below the current version of Mercurial, but if an extension with was only
tested with newer versions, it is considered a candidate for a bad extension,
too. In this case extensions which have been tested with higher versions of
Mercurial are considered better. This allows finding the oldest extension if
ct can't be calculated correctly and therefore defaults to an empty tuple, and
it involves less changes to the comparison logic during the current code
freeze.
This patch changes the function which generates help text about commands and
options to use RST formatting. Tables describing options have been formatted
using RST table markup for some time already, so their appearance does not
change. Command lists, however, change appearance.
To format non-verbose command lists, RST field list markup was chosen, because
it resembles the old format:
<http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html#field-lists>
In the old (hand-coded) format of non-verbose command lists, the left column is
12 characters wide. Our minirst implementation formats field lists with a left
column 14 characters wide, so this patch changes the appearance of help output
correspondingly:
<http://markmail.org/message/krl4cxopsnii7s6z?q=mercurial+reinert+from:%22Olav+Reinert%22&page=2>
The minirst markup most closely resembling the old verbose command lists is
definition lists. But using it would cause a blank line to be inserted between
each command definition, making the output excessively long, and no more
useful than before. To avoid this, I chose to use field lists also for verbose
command help, resulting in output like this example:
add add the specified files on the next commit
annotate, blame
show changeset information by line for each file
clone make a copy of an existing repository
commit, ci commit the specified files or all outstanding changes
diff diff repository (or selected files)
export dump the header and diffs for one or more changesets
forget forget the specified files on the next commit
init create a new repository in the given directory
log, history show revision history of entire repository or files
merge merge working directory with another revision
phase set or show the current phase name
pull pull changes from the specified source
push push changes to the specified destination
qdiff diff of the current patch and subsequent modifications
qinit init a new queue repository (DEPRECATED)
qnew create a new patch
qpop pop the current patch off the stack
qpush push the next patch onto the stack
qrefresh update the current patch
remove, rm remove the specified files on the next commit
serve start stand-alone webserver
status, st show changed files in the working directory
summary, sum summarize working directory state
update, up, checkout, co
update working directory (or switch revisions)
This change is a move towards generating all help text as a list of strings
marked up with RST.
Extension authors should explicitly declare their supported hg
versions and include a buglink attribute in their extension. In the
event that a traceback occurs, we'll identify the
least-recently-tested extensionas the most likely source of the defect
and suggest the user disable that extension.
Packagers should make every effort to ship hg versions from exact
tags, or with as few modifications as possible so that the versioning
can work appropriately.
The output of "hg help" is changed to ensure that the column containing
descriptions of commands, extensions, and other topics is correctly alignmened.
The default width of field lists is changed from 12 to 14 to align minirst with
the rst2html tool. Shrinking the width of the left column to fit the content is
removed, to keep formatting simple and uniform.
Globbing is usually used for filenames, so on windows it is reasonable and very
convenient that glob patterns accepts '\' or '/' when the pattern specifies
'/'.
Before, the help text said that Mercurial would assume 'yes' for all
prompts, but this is confusing since many prompts don't have any 'yes'
choice. It now more accurately describes what will happen.
The verb to allow requires a direct object.
Lintian, a Debian tool to find common mistakes, reported it. I'm not a
native english speaker but I think this is correct.
Invalid extensions in hgext/ could in some cases cause a crash when searching
for unknown commands in disabled extensions.
With this change we issue a warning if extracting commands from the extensions
fails. Traceback is available on request.
Reported on https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=663183 with forest.py.