[PATCH] expand and clarify help for update

[Adrian Buehlmann]

On 30.10.2008 01:33, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:39:19 +0100, Adrian Buehlmann <adrian at cadifra.com> wrote:
>> On 29.10.2008 16:18, Greg Ward wrote:
>>> On 28 October 2008, Adrian Buehlmann said:
>>>> The patched part would end as:
>>> This is following up the rewrite suggested by Hubert Kauker and refined
>>> by me, right?  It seems like this particular help text is getting longer
>>> and longer!
>> Yes. This happened while I was doing that one small fix
>> on top of your changes [1] (patch provided by Giorgos).
>>
>> It got indeed quite a bit longer now. But better be precise.
>>
>> I really prefer to describe what happens with the parents and
>> explain how -C aborts a hg merge (while we are at it).
> 
> I like the text (including the suggestion by Greg to remove an instance
> of 'thus' that can go without much of a loss), but I am also amazed at
> how long this has started becoming.
> 
> Having a lot of useful stuff in the embedded help seems a useful thing,
> but I think there is a certain threshold that we don't want to cross
> while growing the text.  Let's say at about 50 lines of text?

Agreed. With my current wording (patch as sent last night) it is 40 lines
of text - lines about options not counted (that number includes 9 empty lines).

> I am extremely annoyed when `p4 help diff' or `p4 help resolve' throw at
> my face what seems to be a poorly formatted manpage.  It requires a lot
> of scrolling to see what is written, but it still lacks a lot of the
> fine details that a real manpage includes.  Not having something similar
> in Hg would actually be an advantage :)

Hmm 'p4 help diff' is only 43 lines here but 'p4 help resolve' is 116
indeed.

I'm using Rev. P4/NTX86/2007.2/122958 (2007/05/22)