Re: [RFA] Allow to document user-defined aliases.

[Philippe Waroquiers via Gdb-patches <gdb-patches@sourceware.org>]

On Thu, 2022-08-04 at 13:12 -0600, Tom Tromey wrote:
> > > > > > "Philippe" == Philippe Waroquiers via Gdb-patches <gdb-patches@sourceware.org>
> > > > > > writes:
> 
> Philippe> When using 'help ALIASNAME', GDB shows the help of the aliased command.
> Philippe> This is a good default behaviour.
> 
> Philippe> However, GDB alias command allows to define aliases with arguments
> Philippe> possibly changing or tuning significantly the behaviour of
> Philippe> the aliased command.  In such a case, showing the help of the aliased
> Philippe> command might not be ideal.
> [...]
> Philippe> When a user-defined alias is documented specifically, help and apropos
> Philippe> use the provided alias documentation instead of the documentation of
> Philippe> the aliased command.
> 
> This makes sense to me.  My perspective is that the way a command is
> defined (there are 4 or 5 ways now) isn't as important as what it does,
> and users are normally interested in the latter.
Ok, let's start on this basis.
In any case, if one day, we really still want to make an alias appear
in the list of aliases of the aliased command, we can add an option
to the alias command such as:
  -l  list this alias in the aliased command help even if it has its own documentation.

> 
> One question I have is whether there is any way to see how the command
> is defined, if it is documented.  For  commands  using "define" there is
> "show user-defined"... perhaps that ought to be made to work with
> aliases as well.

The command 'help aliases' show the user defined aliases.
However, I think that when doing 'help for-a-user-documented-alias',
it would be better to still show the alias definition.

I will produce an RFA v2 with the above change, and also fixing the comments
you have given in the other mail.

Thanks for the review.

Philippe