[GRASS-dev] Adding an expert mode to the parser

[Vaclav Petras]

On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 5:50 PM, Vaclav Petras <wenzeslaus at gmail.com> wrote:

> If the --help is just for scanning and the issue is that it simply too
> long, hiding some parameters is not the only option we have. For many (and
> more in the future hopefully) parameters we have (short) label and (longer)
> description. --help prints both (if both are present, that's at least 2
> lines per parameter). Additionally, if the option has predefined values
> which have descriptions, there is one line for each of those. So, the
> question is would it be helpful (at least as a first step) if --help would
> print less information for each parameter but still provided all parameters?


Additionally, the label and description is also for the module itself, so
when we have label, we don't need to show description, that's -1 line for
r.slope.aspect. Then we can remove keywords, that's -3 lines. Then we have
the standard/long flags. (These might be similar to the general options
from `ogr2ogr --help-general` which Madi posted.) They are the same all the
time, except for --o, so that's -4 or -3 for the old ones (depending on
module) and -2 for the recently added flags (--qq --ui). They still can be
in `Usage:` section or they may not. There is also an empty line at the
beginning, we can remove it as well because don't go for beauty and the
`Description:` title is also not necessary, so we could remove that as
well, that's -2 lines. That would be 12 lines total. (I have 55 lines in
the terminal windows I'm using right now, so 12 seems to be quite a lot).

In GUI or even in the manual, we could put the standard/long flags to a
separate section as well.

> r.slope.aspect --help

Description:
 Generates raster maps of slope, aspect, curvatures and partial derivatives
from an elevation raster map.
 Aspect is calculated counterclockwise from east.

Keywords:
 raster, terrain, aspect, slope, curvature

Usage:
 r.slope.aspect [-a] elevation=name [slope=name] [aspect=name]
   [format=string] [precision=string] [pcurvature=name] [tcurvature=name]
   [dx=name] [dy=name] [dxx=name] [dyy=name] [dxy=name] [zscale=value]
   [min_slope=value] [--overwrite] [--help] [--verbose] [--quiet] [--ui]

Flags:
  -a   Do not align the current region to the raster elevation map
 --o   Allow output files to overwrite existing files
 --h   Print usage summary
 --v   Verbose module output
 --q   Quiet module output
 --qq  Super quiet module output
 --ui  Force launching GUI dialog
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