Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

RFE: Support systems without man installed #713

Closed
travier opened this issue Feb 25, 2021 · 3 comments · Fixed by #837
Closed

RFE: Support systems without man installed #713

travier opened this issue Feb 25, 2021 · 3 comments · Fixed by #837
Labels
1. Feature request A request for a new feature 2. CLI Issue is related to the command line interface

Comments

@travier
Copy link
Member

travier commented Feb 25, 2021

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Fedora CoreOS systems do not have the man command installed. Running toolbox --help on such a system results in:

$ toolbox --help
Error: man(1) not found

which is not a great user experience.

Describe the solution you'd like
toolbox uses the https://github.com/spf13/cobra module for argument parsing and this module support generating help text from argument parsing code. I have not yet dig into the code to figure out what's needed to use that in toolbox.

@HarryMichal HarryMichal added 1. Feature request A request for a new feature 2. CLI Issue is related to the command line interface labels Feb 25, 2021
@HarryMichal
Copy link
Member

Thank you for opening this issue! I am very much in favor of having a help screen that does not rely on man. I already discussed this with @debarshiray on several occasions.

@debarshiray
Copy link
Member

Well, we are trying to move in a direction where the documentation is consolidated around the manuals by making sure that they are easy to read, are kept updated, etc.. They are written in Markdown, which makes it easy to render them in a web browser, which is nice.

Bits and pieces of the Toolbox documentation have gotten scattered across the Fedora wiki and Silverblue website over time, and that's what motivated this.

So, I don't want to add a second way of showing an elaborate help screen that's independent from the manuals. It will complicate the command line parsing logic, which already has its subtleties that might not be obvious at first, and will be yet another thing that needs to be tested and kept updated as the code evolves.

Also, integrating the manuals with the --help output or a help command isn't without precedent. Git comes to mind, but I won't be surprised if there are more. It's just a nicer way to format a big chunk of text.

That said, I understand the problem when using CoreOS.

How about having a somewhat simple static blurb as a compromise that's unlikely to need a lot of maintenance, and can be dumped to the screen if the man(1) invocation fails? It can direct users to the Toolbox website where they can find the manuals in Markdown format.

toolbox - Tool for containerized command line environments on Linux

Common commands are:
create    Create a new toolbox container
enter     Enter an existing toolbox container
list      List all existing toolbox containers and images

Go to https://github.com/containers/toolbox for further information.

@travier
Copy link
Member Author

travier commented Jul 8, 2021

Would have been great to have the full help but I understand the maintenance burden. This should make things much better.

olivergs added a commit to olivergs/toolbox that referenced this issue Jul 13, 2021
containers#713

Fedora CoreOS systems do not have the man command installed. Running
toolbox --help on such a system results in a "man(1) not found" error.

As a compromise for systems without man, we added a simple help text
showing the most commonly used toolbox commands and an URL that direct
users to the Toolbox website where they can find the manuals in Markdown
format.
HarryMichal pushed a commit to HarryMichal/toolbox that referenced this issue Nov 7, 2021
Fedora CoreOS systems do not have the man command installed. Running
toolbox --help on such a system results in a "man(1) not found" error.

As a compromise for systems without man, we added a simple help text
showing the most commonly used toolbox commands and an URL that direct
users to the Toolbox website where they can find the manuals in Markdown
format.

Fixes containers#713

containers#837
HarryMichal pushed a commit to HarryMichal/toolbox that referenced this issue Nov 7, 2021
Fedora CoreOS systems do not have the man command installed. Running
toolbox --help on such a system results in a "man(1) not found" error.

As a compromise for systems without man, we added a simple help text
showing the most commonly used toolbox commands and an URL that direct
users to the Toolbox website where they can find the manuals in Markdown
format.

Fixes containers#713

containers#837
HarryMichal pushed a commit to HarryMichal/toolbox that referenced this issue Nov 7, 2021
Fedora CoreOS systems do not have the man command installed. Running
toolbox --help on such a system results in a "man(1) not found" error.

As a compromise for systems without man, we added a simple help text
showing the most commonly used toolbox commands and an URL that direct
users to the Toolbox website where they can find the manuals in Markdown
format.

Fixes containers#713

containers#837
HarryMichal pushed a commit to olivergs/toolbox that referenced this issue Nov 7, 2021
Fedora CoreOS systems do not have the man command installed. Running
toolbox --help on such a system results in a "man(1) not found" error.

As a compromise for systems without man, we added a simple help text
showing the most commonly used toolbox commands and an URL that direct
users to the Toolbox website where they can find the manuals in Markdown
format.

Fixes containers#713

containers#837
HarryMichal pushed a commit that referenced this issue Nov 7, 2021
Fedora CoreOS systems do not have the man command installed. Running
toolbox --help on such a system results in a "man(1) not found" error.

As a compromise for systems without man, we added a simple help text
showing the most commonly used toolbox commands and an URL that direct
users to the Toolbox website where they can find the manuals in Markdown
format.

Fixes #713

#837
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
1. Feature request A request for a new feature 2. CLI Issue is related to the command line interface
Projects
None yet
Development

Successfully merging a pull request may close this issue.

3 participants