On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 8:45 AM, Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com> wrote:

severity 13737 wishlist
tag 13737 + wontfix
thanks

anatoly techtonik wrote:
> It is very inconvenient to type --help every time when you need to read
> help. It will be useful to have -h shortcut (a de-facto standard in a
> Python world and probably scripts in other languages).

You can already use "--h" as a short abreviation for "--help" since
that is a unique combination.

I don't understand your argument about "unique combination". The main issue is that people like me expect -h to work as a --help shortcut. They don't have a chance to know "--h" without reading the docs, so --h is not useful. And by the way - this --h is not documented.

$ users --h

Give that a try and please report back your comments concerning it.

Above.

The bar for adding new short options to the utilities is very high.

Sorry, but it is an argument. It will be interesting to know why though.

Also the users command doesn't have a complicated usage syntax.

Actually, it is. I expected it to give me this information:

cut -d: -f1,3 /etc/passwd | egrep ':[0-9]{4}$' | cut -d: -f1

But it gives something else, so to understand what it actually does, I have to read the help. This is a complicated usage, because it is possible to have one step faster help access instead of two step. This also have a complicated usage (not "usage syntax"), because it doesn't match to the users expectations towards shell command.

To confirm that argument we'd have to run the poll - if the users expect -h to work as --help by default. Do you know where we can run it? Does Debian provide any kind of voting system for users/contributors?

In
order to add -h it would need a pretty strong justification.
Therefore I have tagged this as a wishlist and wontfix as a default
answer unless there is an opposition champion.

I am here. =)