Date: 2016-02-13
Accepted
Amended by 9. Help scripts
The tool will have a help subcommand to provide documentation
for users.
It's nice to have usage documentation in the script files themselves, in comments. When reading the code, that's the first place to look for information about how to run a script.
Write usage documentation in comments in the source file.
Distinguish between documentation comments and normal comments. Documentation comments have two hash characters at the start of the line.
The adr help command can parse comments out from the script
using the standard Unix tools grep and cut.
No need to maintain help text in a separate file.
Help text can easily be kept up to date as the script is edited.
There's no automated check that the help text is up to date. The tests do not work well as documentation for users, and the help text is not easily cross-checked against the code.
This won't work if any subcommands are not implemented as scripts that use '#' as a comment character.