openstack team mailing list archive

[Adam Spiers <aspiers@xxxxxxxx>]

Dean Troyer (dtroyer@xxxxxxxxx) wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 2:19 PM, Dolph Mathews <dolph.mathews@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > I find this behavior really annoying... --help should be contextual
> > (depending on whether a subcommand is present, and what it is).
> 
> > I hope not... +1 for argparse.
> 
> Actually, argparse is one reason for this behaviour.  It doesn't like
> duplicated options in subparsers, nor subsets of names like we found
> in keystone with --tenant and --tenant_id, etc.  IIRC none of the
> existing clients do that, they all rely on 'help command' to get
> command-specific help.

As of my recent patch, --help is contextual in nova:

  https://review.openstack.org/6460

and I have started work on some of the other commands too, so it would
be helpful if we could reach a consensus on this soon ... although
please let me know if I am wasting my time working on other commands
due to any imminent rewrites using python-openstack!

I agree with Dolph - there is a precedent from other well-known
programs (git, hg, svn are the first ones I can think of) for --help
to behave differently depending on whether or not it was preceded by a
subcommand.  So my vote is that we should definitely aim to adhere to
this pattern.