Ckan: `ckan help` is nearly useless

[ToxicFrog]

The offline documentation is extremely sparse, but that's ok, because ckan has a built in help command, right?

Well, not so much:

• ckan help doesn't list common options like --debug
• ckan help <command> produces the same output as ckan help
• Running a command without arguments produces help, but...
  
  
  
  • If it's a command that doesn't _take_ arguments, like update, it just runs the command
  
  
  • Even if it's a command that does, like install, it only lists some of the flags, not all of them
  
  

The upshot of this is that extremely useful options like update --repo or install --ckanfile can only be discovered by reading the source.

[pjf]

The command line parser used by the CKAN CmdLine makes us all cry. This is something we would _love_ to have fixed.

[ToxicFrog]

I was going to say "why not just use the C# equivalent of argparse or getopts", but it looks like there isn't one in the standard libraries. Oops.

I may poke around at this at some point, but free time is scarce these days.

[pjf]

Why not just use the C# equivalent of argparse or getopts...

That was my first thought! Hey, command-line options, I do these things for breakfast... Let me just grab get getopts library that's built in and.... oh.

So far we've had at least two people spend a couple of hours trying to get the library to do things like call our own help function (the default one _is_ terrible), but to no available. I am very slowly reworking the architecture of the command-line front-end to be much cleaner, and that will certainly assist us in the future, but this isn't as easy a fix as it should be.

Somehow I get the hunch that .NET developers mostly work with GUIs, and command-line interfaces don't quite have the same level of library support as I've grown accustomed to under Unix. ;)

[tips48]

This is on my todo list for the CmdLine rewrite

[RichardLake]

I was mucking around and rewrote cmdline to use a different command parser. The default help is somewhat more useful but the system as a whole is less open to customisation than the current. I'm not sure if it is worth using but it is up on 16cd88a17 is you wish to check it out.

[Ippo343]

This issue was moved to KSP-CKAN/CKAN-cmdline#2

[pjf]

Re-opening with great joy!

[RichardLake]

Once again - can people check out 16cd88a17 (based of a old version) and tell me if they think the help is better?

[mgsdk]

From a user standpoint I like the help in the version @RichardLake linked over what we have now. I don't know if there is too much difference in the code behind the scenes, but it would be interesting to investigate further.

[politas]

Fixed by #2197