scons -h should print new options

[bdbaddog]

This issue was originally created at: 2009-02-24 13:54:13.
This issue was reported by: stevenknight.

stevenknight said at 2009-02-24 13:54:13

If you add options to SCons via AddOption(), SCons will print them in its optparse-style help shown by scons -h.

However, if you also add help text via Help(), SCons no longer prints the optparse-style help. You can still see help on SCons's built-in command line options using scons -H, but since that doesn't parse the SConscript files it doesn't show any of the added options.

The feature request is for SCons to maintain a second optparse instance containing only the options added via AddOption(). If help text has been added via Help(), SCons could print only the optparse help for this second optparse instance, followed by the text added via Help().

The text of the final line of help: 'Use scons -H for help about command-line options.' should also be changed to something like 'Use scons -H for help about scons built-in command-line options.' since it doesn't print help about ALL command line options, only those built into SCons.

gregnoel said at 2009-03-05 15:16:13

Bug party triage.

stevenknight said at 2009-11-10 18:00:20

stevenknight => issues@scons

[mwichmann]

Adding comments to let github linking work: see also #2611, #2258, #2831. Since two of those are closed (one as a dup, one resolved), is this still an issue?

[mwichmann]

The current behavior is documented, but I don't like it either. All options added via AddOption already go into a separate option group (local_option_group, which is a SConsOptionGroup), so it should be possible to fish them out separately... it's not trivial because of the way help is processed, but should be doable.

[mwichmann]

I have an implementation that fishes the help out of the local option group. The question now is what the right way to present this is.

Help(txt)  # all existing help text is tossed
Help(txt, append=True)  # full help is saved, SCons + AddOption
Help(txt, local_only=True)  # SCons help is tossed, but AddOption text is saved

It feels to me that the primary behavior should be that of the tentatively-named local_only (that is, that's what should happen when the longer-standing append=True is given), and the less-common option should be to also save the SCons help.

Also the sense of the flags could change: in the experimental version you need append False and local_only True to save the local help, but that could easily be both-True.