Node: Inconsistent flag & environment variable documentation

[BridgeAR]

Right now we have a inconsistent documentation of multiple of our environment variables and CLI options. These have to be documented at least in three places: /doc/api/cli.md, /src/node.cc and /doc/node.1. Most of the time the variable or flag would also be documented a fourth time in the code that it belongs to.

I added the help wanted label so we can address this.

1) We need a full list of currently existing flags and variables and if they are fully documented or not.
2) We have to fix all of them.

[addaleax]

I’m currently working on a large-scale refactor of our options “parsing”.

One major benefit of this would be making the options programmatically accessible. I’d love it if we could bake all documentation on them into the Node.js binary, so that we could automatically generate at least the --help output, and – this might be a far shot – the other two documentation pages as well.

[BridgeAR]

That would be really awesome!

[richardlau]

@addaleax it would also be good if we could use the same refactor to handle how we whitelist options allowed in the NODE_OPTIONS environment variable.

[LukeTully]

Is there a source of truth for the most up to date version of these which the remaining docs are inconsistent with? Are they all in varying states of having particular flags be the source of truth for others?

[Trott]

Is this something that's being tracked somehow that will make it obvious if/when this can be closed?

[BridgeAR]

@Trott it is currently not tracked. I believe we could check this when we have a Code & Learn upcoming as consolidating these would be a great task (likely multiple ones).