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My understanding is the opposite: man pages are much more difficult to produce than plain help text, so it's unreasonable to expect they'll always be available,
by maleldil 2y ago
My understanding is the opposite: man pages are much more difficult to produce than plain help text, so it's unreasonable to expect they'll always be available, while help is easy enough to (almost) always be there. If you use any CLI library at all, it will automatically be generated. If you don't, the equivalent of `argv[1] == "--help"` is good enough.
These days, I'm positively surprised when I find man pages for a program, whereas I'm annoyed when one doesn't support --help.
- lloeki 2y ago> man pages are much more difficult to produce than plain help text They're absolutely trivial to generate these days, gone are the days of having to deal with roff, you can write a quite dumb markdown file and produce a man page out of it in short order. https://github.com/sunaku/md2man/blob/master/EXAMPLE.markdown https://github.com/sunaku/md2man/blob/master/EXAMPLE.markdow... https://github.com/rtomayko/ronn/blob/master/man/ronn-format.7.ronn https://github.com/rtomayko/ronn/blob/master/man/ronn-format...
- maleldil 2y agoI'm not necessarily saying they're _difficult_, but it should be obvious they're relatively harder. For --help, the least I could do would be a conditional at the top of the program, or let my CLI library auto-generate it for me. For man pages, I have to go out of my way to explicitly generate and distribute them.