On Sat, Jul 26, 2025 at 9:12 AM D. Ben Knoble <ben.knoble@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > I have a few (unsent) patches I've been working on that touch the help > mechanism, so I have some thoughts below. > > On Sat, Jul 26, 2025 at 4:13 AM Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > On Fri, Jul 25, 2025 at 04:52:40PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > > > > > When it redirects to our commands, it is less risky as we aim to > > > make all our commands honor a single "-h" via t0450. > > > > > > $ git -c alias.c=checkout c -h > > > 'c' is aliased to 'checkout' > > > usage: git checkout [<options>] <branch> > > > or: git checkout [<options>] [<branch>] -- <file>... > > > > > > -b <branch> create and checkout a new branch > > > -B <branch> create/reset and checkout a branch > > > ... > > > --pathspec-from-file <file> > > > read pathspec from file > > > --pathspec-file-nul with --pathspec-from-file, pathspec elements are separated with NUL character > > > > > > But then, it may not be such a good idea to pay attention to "do we > > > have extra '-h'?" when alias expands to our commands, e.g. > > > > Another interesting case: even for our own commands, the alias itself > > may add extra arguments, which confuses things further. So: > > > > $ git -c alias.gi='grep --cached' gi -h > > 'gi' is aliased to 'grep --cached' > > fatal: no pattern given > > > > runs git-grep, but even though the user said only "-h" the alias added > > another option which prevents the help-mode from activating. > > > > In this case it is not too harmful, but you can come up with > > pathological cases where it actually runs a real command: > > > > git -c alias.grep-for-foo='grep -e foo' grep-for-foo -h > > > > which runs a real grep. > > > > I guess one way to deal with it would be if the user runs "foo -h", and > > alias.foo is "bar --other arguments", then we run just "bar -h", > > dropping the extra arguments provided by the alias. > > This is intriguing: it would mean that an alias is not purely a > textual replacement? That's true for ! aliases today, but other than > shelling out it's pretty close. One other thing I've just remembered: "git help alias" shows the alias information without running it. So I don't know if special-casing "-h" adds much? -- D. Ben Knoble
