Chapter 9 ideas

[Brian W. Fitzpatrick]

On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 12:57 PM, Larry Shatzer, Jr. <larrys at gmail.com> wrote:
> (Resending this as I got a bounce back...)
>
> I was looking over the reference in chapter 9 to make sure the sections that
> list all the options for each of the subcommands was up to date, and noticed
> it varied between command on order,

I mostly mirrored the ordering on the output of svn help, but I could
be convinced that alphabetical is better...

> and some had all the "global" options,
> and some did not.

Can you give some examples?  I will say that I specifically did not
list --username and --password for commands that do not use them (and
for the record, I still *strongly* disagree with the decision to just
have every command--even the ones that don't use them--accept these
options)

> I was also confused as to the inclusion of some of the
> options in the global section at the top, when they are not really that
> global, some commands don't even list them, such as --targets for import.

Options in Subversion are global--whether or not commands use them
depends on the command, but we shouldn't have grown any commands that
change.
I
> was also hoping to somehow include the layout of the global options also
> including some documentation about each option in each subcommands section.
> Maybe to start off with the text from svn help SUBCOMMAND could be a good
> start. It would be even better if it could be automated to grab the
> docstrings from the svn help output and drop them into the docbook sections.
>
> So before I continue with this (if it is something that is needed), should I
> include all the output of svn help SUBCOMMAND in the <screen> sections to
> start off with? I also had questions about adding --non-recursive in there,
> since the output says it is obsolete, and I doubt we want to document it in
> the book.

Maybe I missed a previous email, but what are you planning to do here?
 I'm about to start copyediting Chapter 9, and that's going to tear it
apart, so unless it's really impt, it should probably wait...

-Fitz