Add protocol information to CLI argument help string

[spaceone]

No description provided.

[bagder]

You can use proxy to do non-HTTP protocols too. --request works for at least FTP as well as HTTP, probably more too I can't remember off-hand.

[spaceone]

Ok, yes. It seems the changes in --proxy-* can be used for more than HTTP.
The first time i was reading curl --help it was hard and not very intuitive to understand (e.g. it was not clear that --request COMMAND means HTTP METHOD (the term defined in RFC 7230)). IMHO it should be enhanced to make curl more userfriendly. I think it would be good to improve the following points:
The order is alphabetically instead of grouping sections which belong to each other.
It should be clear for every option to which protocols they belong to.
As you can see here:
https://github.com/spaceone/circuits.http/blob/master/examples/curl.py#L163
I added some example groups like 'Output', 'Connection', 'SSL', $protocols. As options belong to multiple protocols I think the flags [H] / [F], etc. are good enough.

How do you think about this? I could investigate some time to fix these points and make a pull request then.

[bagder]

It sounds excellent. I would be useful to see how the --help output would look like when you run your code.

Also, it could be an idea to actually include your script into the git repo so that we can generate future --help outputs that way once we agree on the results.

[spaceone]

My current output looks like this: https://bpaste.net/show/2ea7b5081e50
(it is ofc. WIP).

I'll then see that I will create a nice structure for the --help output!

[bagder]

I would like to get more users to participate in this discussion but apparently it doesn't happen (here). I'll make a separate post to the curl-users list soon and see if I can attract some interest as the situation with the --help output comes up every now and then as something to improve.

The problems I see with this separation is that you put each option under a single label while they work for more than one. For example lots of the options you now have under HTTP(S) also work for numerous other protocols.

An idea: lets store a set of keywords for each command line option and introduce a new option that can output all options that are related to that keyword. Like "curl --help-list FTP" to get all the ones that work for FTP and "curl --help-list proxy" etc. Then the same option could be listed for several keywords.

If that works decently, maybe the default -h/--help output could be stripped down to only show the most frequently used options and then refer to the --help-list method and the keywords as a way to list the rest?

[spaceone]

Yes, the idea of "--help-list" is worth to think about it. I just added myself to the curl-users mailing list. If you already wrote a message please give me a link to it.

[gvanem]

IMHO adding colours to the --help output would be a great help to improve readability. If a user is interested in only (S)FTP options, it would make sense to colourise all the (H) and (F) markers to find the correct option faster.

tool_help.c could e.g. use ~3(H)~0 and map colour 3 using ANSI, WinConsole calls, etc.

[bagder]

My post and some replies can be found here: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.curl.general/14780

[bagder]

I'd prefer comments/work to continue in the style as mentioned, unless other/better ways are brought forward. Closing this for now.