[GRASS5] Re: [GRASSLIST:802] some code cleanup?

[Hamish]

> In my work of this week I found some annoyities in GRASS source code,
> version 6.1 cvs (updated on Monday), that could be easily removed for
> the sake of consistency.

"easily removed" may not be so easy.

> Case 1. In the aprox. 300 GRASS commands, the following ones don't
> honour the "--help" parameter (instead, they try to run): g.setproj,
> i.ortho.photo, v.build.all, d.rast.edit, d.redraw, i.class, i.points
> (and I get the message: "ERROR: The parser doesn't work here.") and
> i.vpoints.

check the online help pages for modules missing a description.

I just fixed r.digit to use the parser, there was code there to catch
"--help" ...


> BTW, Why the help messages go throught stderr instead stdout??
 
--help and bad_option= are treated the same, and warnings are sent to
stderr so you can do fine grain redirections, e.g.

r.out map > answers.txt

and get the data output to your file and error messages to the screen.
Or you can save the messages and send the data to /dev/null ...
Sometimes there are 1000s of warnings which hide the answer you are
looking for.
It's very useful.

I agree that with --help the "data" output is the descriptive text.
For a bad option parameter it isn't.

see also --html-description, --interface-description, and --tcltk


Hamish