hg command reference?

[Martin Geisler]

Jens Alfke <jens at mooseyard.com> writes:

> On Apr 20, 2010, at 11:57 AM, Matt Mackall wrote:
>
>> If we want to automatically generate a web page per command from the
>> latest verbose help text, we can probably do that pretty easily.
>
> Good idea. Tangentially, that reminds me of one of the features of git
> that I like [I know, I'm forced to use it at work] — you can configure
> it to open its help in a web browser, so "git help commit" comes up as
> a full web page. This gives a lot of room for formatting, supports
> hyperlinks between commands, and also stays out of the way of my
> terminal session, so I can still see my previous commands and can
> leave the help window open for reference.
>
> Has anyone thought of adding this to Mercurial?

Yes, sort of -- I've thought of making a new Docutils reST role for
marking up Mercurial commands. That would mean that we can switch from
writing:

    Use the command 'hg update' to switch to an existing branch.

to writing

    Use the command :hg:`update` to switch to an existing branch.

That would give us programmatic control over what happens with the text
so we can generate links and insert other markup as needed.

This will require yet another small extension to the minirst parser and
the appropriate role definition for rst2html and rst2man.

-- 
Martin Geisler

Fast and powerful revision control: http://mercurial.selenic.com/