Optional flag help hinders the functionality

[optionalemon]

After reading through your UG, I believe that the optional flag -h is meant to allow a function to perform its task while displaying the help message.

However, it seems like with a -h flag, functions clear, add member and delete member cannot be performed (have not tried rest of the functions, I believe they are of the same issue, you may want to look into them).

This is quite undesirable as the user guide suggests for a different function than the actual product. An easy way would be change the description in UG to suggest that the existence of -h flag cannot go with the actual execution we want to perform

[soc-pe-bot]

Team's Response

Hi, thanks for the bug report!

While we can understand your confusion on expecting the -h flag to allow a command to execute a task while displaying a help message, this is the intended behaviour.

Moreover, our UG does not mention that a command can do both - provide help as well as execute the action itself. Since you did not include any specific section of the UG, we are not sure which part made you feel this way. In any case, we group all flags that a command can possibly have to show the options available to the user - this does not mean that multiple behaviours are possible simultaneously. For example, running sort tasks asc dsc is not meant to sort tasks in both ascending and descending order.

Adding -h to a command indicates that the user is unsure of the command syntax or functionality. Hence, they are requesting for more details.

Imagine if you ran clear -h. Would you expect all entries to be deleted? We don't think so. It is more likely that the user is seeking help on how to use the clear command. We feel the -h flag is meant as a sign to just provide help regarding the command - not execute the command itself.

In fact, it would be extremely unpleasant if I wanted to get help for the delete command but the application ends up deleting persons and showing help at the same time.

Hope you understand our rationale for designing the commands and flags to work in the way they do.

Have a nice reading week!

Items for the Tester to Verify

:question: Issue response

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:question: Issue type

Team chose [type.DocumentationBug] Originally [type.FunctionalityBug]

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:question: Issue severity

Team chose [severity.Low] Originally [severity.High]

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