Make --help output more consistent and narrower

[keszybz]

No description provided.

[codecov]

Codecov Report

Merging #10556 (9876acd) into master (f0e9a44) will decrease coverage by 0.01%.
The diff coverage is 100.00%.

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##           master   #10556      +/-   ##
==========================================
- Coverage   68.82%   68.80%   -0.02%     
==========================================
  Files         406      406              
  Lines       87954    87954              
  Branches    19540    19540              
==========================================
- Hits        60536    60521      -15     
- Misses      22850    22864      +14     
- Partials     4568     4569       +1     

Impacted Files	Coverage Δ
mesonbuild/mtest.py	77.21% <100.00%> (ø)
mesonbuild/dependencies/dev.py	56.77% <0.00%> (-1.83%)	⬇️
mesonbuild/dependencies/ui.py	68.45% <0.00%> (-1.35%)	⬇️
mesonbuild/dependencies/cmake.py	83.54% <0.00%> (-1.03%)	⬇️
mesonbuild/dependencies/base.py	85.91% <0.00%> (-0.56%)	⬇️

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[eli-schwartz]

Argparse doesn't use dots at the end, so some --help lines had a
dot, and some didn't. So drop them everywhere for consistency.

Hmm, but why not add them everywhere for consistency? e.g. now you end up with some --help lines containing multiple sentences where only the first sentence has a dot.

[keszybz]

Argparse doesn't use dots at the end, so some --help lines had a
dot, and some didn't. So drop them everywhere for consistency.

Hmm, but why not add them everywhere for consistency? e.g. now you end up with some --help lines containing multiple sentences where only the first sentence has a dot.

Two reasons: 1. there's an autogenerated messages for --help itself which use a dot and is provided implicitly by argparse. 2. the dots are not that useful here. They take up space and make the text *feel" longer. Help outputs like this are almost always without help. The few places where there are multiple sentences still read OK without the dot.

[eli-schwartz]

there's an autogenerated messages for --help itself which use a dot and is provided implicitly by argparse.

But this:

-h, --help                               show this help message and exit

also refrains from capitalizing the first word, while you went ahead and capitalized all the manually defined option entries, so the autogenerated --help is still inconsistent. So I don't see the problem with making this one autogenerated message be inconsistent about the dot as well.

[keszybz]

Yes, that's true. But consistency is just one of the reasons. The other reason is that it's just better to not have the dots, as described above. Most --help outputs don't.