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A comment on Code Inflation [pdf]. Parent comment

Re:Code Inflation [pdf] by wyldfire on Friday April 17, 2015 @08:00PM (#9397825)
> I think the argument can be made that command lines tools shouldn't provide versioning and help text at all - leave it up to the manual pages.

I'd have a real hard time agreeing with that. But I could make an exception for /bin/true.

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Re:Code Inflation [pdf] by userbinator on Friday April 17, 2015 @09:11PM (#9397988)
I think that the code to handle versioning and help text (except a brief usage message, which is often useful) shouldn't be included in each binary.

I agree that help text should be the purpose of the manpages.

A version number (or pointer to version string) could be one of the fields in the file header, to be read by a tool ("version"?) and displayed that way.

This way you still get versioning and documentation, without a massive duplication of functionality across every single binary.

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