[PATCH 0/6] notmuch cli config changes

Mark Walters markwalters1009 at gmail.com
Tue Feb 12 23:51:19 PST 2013


> Jameson Graef Rollins <jrollins at finestructure.net> writes:
>
>> But don't get me wrong, the CLI is one of the things that makes notmuch
>> so incredibly awesome.  It's an email swiss army knife that's there when
>> you need it.  But given that even I often need to look at the man page
>> during my occasional CLI usage, I just don't want to see it get to
>> overcrowded.
>
> Well, maybe this should be a discussion about how to organize the CLI
> documentation so that more commonly used options are easy to find. That
> would indeed be a side effect of making less commonly used options
> controlled by environment variables, and documenting the environment
> variables at the bottom of the man pages as per tradition. But I don't
> think this is the only way or even the best way to achieve good
> documentation.

I think one of the problems for documentation is that we have two
classes of "user" of the cli: one is actually people and one is front
ends (and yes scripting does blur the boundary). Would it be worth
splitting based on that. For example, the --format-version is really
only for front-end use. --format=text is for human use, whereas the
other options are mostly front-end (text0 might be an exception)

Best wishes

Mark


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