Re: [Gnu-arch-users] clean up tla help

[David Allouche]

On Sun, 2005-11-20 at 10:20 +0100, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
>    > tla --help -- tla help all
>    >
>    > tla help -- what your patch does
> 
>    This is possibly the single worst UI design idea I have ever heard
>    in my life.
> 
> It is normal in the course of a discourse that when one gives a
> thought it should also be supported by some kind of an argument.  I
> have given some of mine (I have more reasons why making --help useful
> is a good idea), so may you could share yours.

Daniel is a good hacker, but he likes having an intentionally tactless
attitude. But, really, I know he can be a better troll than that. That
was pretty lame.

To try being constructive, I think his issue with your proposal is that
its violates the principle of least surprise.

I think people are just as likely to run "tla --help" or "tla help" as
their first command after first installing tla to get a feel of what is
in there. There is no reason that the users that did "tla --help" should
be flooded under hundreds of mostly irrelevent commands (tla
make-category, tla explicit-default anyone?) while the ones who did "tla
help" should get a reasonable help text with "don't panic" written in
large friendly letters.

I'm pretty sure that if you take an hypothetical user, let's call it
Brad, who comes complaining that "the help message is insane", telling
him that "the help message is what `tla help` gives, not what `tla
--help` gives" should prompt a pretty colourful and WTF-shaped reaction.

Of course, you can also decide that tla is not about seducing new users,
but just about being useful to those who are currently using it. In this
case UI improvements aimed at new users, like this one, are not really
worth arguing about.
-- 
                                                            -- ddaa

signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part