[Nagiosplug-devel] Extra opts help text

[Olivier 'Babar' Raginel]

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 08:52:31AM +0100, Ton Voon wrote:
>   Exceeds the 80-character limit that we usually enforce on --help
>   output.
> 
> From dev guidelines: "Code and output should try to respect the 80x25
> size of a crt (remember when fixing stuff in the server room!)"
> I think the 80 char limit is a bit too conservative in this day and age
> (would you read a plugin help output on a terminal in a server room?),
> so I'd say some higher limit, say, 132 chars. But I guess that's just
> some other arbitrary number too.
> 
> Any opinions? In any event, I think I'll change the dev guidelines to
> remove the "server room" comment.

It's not only server room. I often have my screen filled up with 80 cols 
width terminals. Yes, I could have one big and use screen or something 
similar, or one of those tabbed terminals, but I doubt I'm the only one 
working like that.
80 columns are still good, and not only for server room.

So, I would say either you want to stick to 80 chars, or you go all the 
way and implement some clever mechanism.
What I would vote for is to put everything in man pages. Yes, this will 
deroute windows users, but man pages / pod were invented exactly for 
this.

On the implementation side, this would mean splitting the documentation 
and the code, at least for C programs, and I agree this might not be a 
good thing. So one alternative would be to add some step to the release 
process which would strip out the --help text and put it inside a 
manpage, and replace the --help output with some dummy text, such as: 
Please read the man pages for $0, using: man $0

-- 
Babar - from the 90's :)