I'm exploring

help

in 2.16.0a0 - excellent! A few points - if they're unknown, I can file issues.

./pants help backends

and

./pants help-advanced backends

show the same content (both include preview/experimental backends).

./pants help backends

shows that

pants.backend.build_files.fix.deprecations

and

pants.backend.build_files.fmt.black

are NOT enabled by default, but I thought they were -- at least

update-build-files

runs black on all the BUILD files without that being enabled... is the depredations fixer actually disabled by default? How do we add documentation to

./pants help backends

? Some of them have a description and others don't - is that exposing a module-level docstring in the module that has

register.py

? @curved-television-6568

./pants help

does not show

./pants help symbols

, but the help works marvelously. It also does not say that we can use

help <symbol>

.

I'm wondering if

help-advanced

still makes sense, or is just confusing?

They seem to be pretty much the same thing. Though, I can imagine moving api-types and rules under advanced as most users won't care about that. Minimizing the number of "what's that?" a user has to go through to answer their question is a good thing.

The idea was that

help

would be for options you might want to specify as a CLI flag, and

help-advanced

would be for all the other options (ones you'd specify via config)

./pants help backends

and

./pants help-advanced backends

show the same content (both include preview/experimental backends).

whops. idea was to only show experimental with the help-advanced option (unless it was enabled).

Yeah.

update-build-files

list is hard-coded. Apparently, you can ALSO have

pants.backend.build_files.fix.deprecations

run when running the

fix

goal. In any case, that output is a bit confusing.

@curved-television-6568

./pants help

does not show

./pants help symbols

, but the help works marvelously. It also does not say that we can use

help <symbol>

.

❤️ oversights 😉