Try to improve help options text for basic commands

[Martin Geisler]

Faheem Mitha <faheem at email.unc.edu> writes:

> On Sat, 21 Nov 2009, Greg Ward wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 7:44 PM, Faheem Mitha <faheem at email.unc.edu> wrote:
>
>>> +1 on saying something about DAGs. I think including something about
>>> the DAG in the help would be a very good idea. Set up some
>>> terminology, then it can be referenced in the rest of the help. This
>>> has the big advantage of being precise, then we won't need to have
>>> arguments about whether the wording is good enough.
>>>
>>> hg help DAG
>>
>> Good idea, but saying "DAG" is a bit too technical IMHO. (Not
>> everyone studied CS in university.) What about "hg help concepts",
>> since the graph of changesets is the core concept behind Mercurial?
>> Lift some text from the wiki or Bryan's book, trim out excess words,
>> and ta-da.

I agree about "DAG" being too technical... I like "concepts" or perhaps
"terminology" would work better? I think it would be easier to write the
help topic first -- when we can see what it contains and decide on an
appropriate name :-)

> I think concepts is a bit vague. I don't think DAG is that terrifying
> and it would still be my first choice. However, before worrying about
> exact terminology let's see if there is buy-in for the general idea of
> such a help topic.

There is, additional help topics are a great idea!

They are even quite easy to make: put a file under help/ and register it
in the helptable at the bottom of mercurial/help.py. Voilá!

-- 
Martin Geisler

VIFF (Virtual Ideal Functionality Framework) brings easy and efficient
SMPC (Secure Multiparty Computation) to Python. See: http://viff.dk/.
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