Currently

help-all

dumps out help for all scopes in the same human-readable format as help for a single scope. This seems not very useful, as that much data is inherently not human-readable, and presumably people were grepping the output anyway. I was thinking of making it instead dump out a big JSON blob containing all help, which is a feature we need anyway. That can still be grepped (or jq'd), but it would have a consistent structure, unlike the human-readable format, which we might change from time to time for purely human reasons. Any objections?

JSON sounds good. Personally, I think I would want even more a name of the subsystems + a list of their options, but no details on the options. Then I can run

./pants help pytest

to learn more Very similar to the previous

./pants options

goal, but simpler because it doesn’t show the current value

Well, we need the JSON thing anyway

if a user really does want to print out help for every option in one gigantic list, we could have a flag for that. it probably shouldn't be the default