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How to use Python well?

Westley Martínez anikom15 at gmail.com
Fri Feb 18 21:20:57 EST 2011 
On Sat, 2011-02-19 at 11:39 +1100, Ben Finney wrote:
> Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> writes:
> 
> > In article <slrnilu2e0.15e.grahn+nntp at frailea.sa.invalid>,
> >  Jorgen Grahn <grahn+nntp at snipabacken.se> wrote:
> >
> > > On Thu, 2011-02-17, Roy Smith wrote:
> > > > These days, user documentation for me means good help text for
> > > > argparse to use.
> > > 
> > > Perhaps I'm old-fashioned, but all other software I use (on Unix)
> > > has man pages. I /expect/ there to be one. (It's not hard to write a
> > > man page either, if you have a decent one as a template.)
> >
> > The nice thing about help text is that it keeps the documentation and
> > the code in one place, which makes it a little more likely people will
> > actually update the docs as they update the code.
> 
> Yes, that's nice for the programmer. But isn't the point of the man page
> to be nice for the users? The man pages document many more things than
> help text output from the program.
> 
> -- 
>  \      “Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not |
>   `\     happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these |
> _o__)                          defects.” —Mark Twain, _A Horse's Tale_ |
> Ben Finney

>From what I've seen, the man pages are supposed to be in depth
information that covers every nook and cranny of every option while the
--help option is supposed to simply print a summary in case one forgets
the syntax, but nowadays they've kind of been blended together.
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