Open kov opened 2 weeks ago
FWIW, the uutils/coreutils project doesn't seem to be aiming at replicating the help messages from its GNU counterpart. I took a cursory look at the output for various utilities, and in fact I'm seeing help messages that are more detailed and better structured. From a cursory look, I could find the following relevant issues: uutils/coreutils#818 and uutils/coreutils#4000. Both seem to go in the direction of option 2, i.e. rewrite help (and error) messages to dodge any copyright concerns.
I personally don't think scripted parsing of the help messages should be a concern. Those are localized, and intended for humans.
I am working on the cmp implementation (https://github.com/uutils/diffutils/pull/88) and would like to have --help output something useful, which I think is important for our version to really replace GNU cmp on a system. We should figure out which way to go here so that we can apply it to the other diffutils tools.
I believe we have 2 main options:
Option 1 has the benefit of being familiar for people who are used to the GNU tooling, or for those crazy enough to have scripted parsing of this output, for some reason. I suppose the main concern for doing it like this is an argument could be made that the output is copyrighted. This is how I envision it looking (note the different links at the bottom):
Option 2 is slightly more work, but dodges any concerns related to using stuff directly from GNU cmp, and something we would probably want if we ever move to something like Clap, I suppose.
Thoughts? Concerns?