799312 - mach help <command> should work

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox Build System :: Mach Core, enhancement)

Description

[Gregory Szorc [:gps]]

|mach help| displays generic help
|mach <command> --help| displays help for the specified command
|mach help <command>| displays generic help

|mach help <command>| should probably display help for a specific command. That's more user friendly and follows the convention of Git, Mercurial, etc after all.

Comment 1

[Gregory Szorc [:gps]]

Attachment: Make |mach help <command>| work

Even |mach help help| works \o/

Example output:

$ ./mach help xpcshell-test

usage: mach [global arguments] command [command arguments] xpcshell-test
       [-h] [--debug] [TEST]

positional arguments:
  TEST         Test to run. Can be specified as a single JS file, a directory,
               or omitted. If omitted, the entire test suite is executed.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help   show this help message and exit
  --debug, -d  Run test in a debugger.


That redundancy in the usage line is an existing bug. Time to file another bug...

Comment 2

[Jeff Hammel]

Comment on attachment 669375 [details] [diff] [review]
Make |mach help <command>| work

I would greatly prefer if the _help function actually contained the logic to do this.  Maybe you can set the parser (temporarily?) on the instance such that you don't need to pass it to every function?

i'll r+ this, but would like a follow-up to fix this more rigorously

Comment 3

[Gregory Szorc [:gps]]

I'm working on a patch now that changes how the class instances for command providers are instantiated. In short, no more requiring a specific __init__. I plan to pass the parser instance to the class instance as part of this change.

Comment 4

[Gregory Szorc [:gps]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/e6202ccc349b