Re: [MirageOS-devel] command line arguments for unikernels

[Daniel BÃnzli <daniel.buenzli@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Le dimanche, 30 novembre 2014 Ã 22:21, Richard Mortier a Ãcrit :
> On 28 Nov 2014, at 17:08, Daniel BÃnzli <daniel.buenzli@xxxxxxxxxxxx 
> (mailto:daniel.buenzli@xxxxxxxxxxxx)> wrote:
> > ...I really like the idea that only what is really used in the 
> > configuration file gets documented in the help or parsed from the command 
> > line.
>  
> i have to say, i really don't. or at least, i suspect i would really want 
> there to be some way that i could get, from the command line, documentation 
> on the things that i haven't used in the configuration file but could've.

I think this is because you are mixing two things that should be kept separate.

There's 1) the documentation of the particular instance of a configuration 
system you are dealing with and 2) there's the documentation of the 
configuration system itself (i.e. assemblage).  

For 1) it would be misleading and there's no point in exposing a configuration 
option that has no effect. Besides it may be operated by someone who doesn't 
care at all about 2) so you want to make his experience optimal by not giving 
him information he doesn't need.

For 2) that belongs to the documentation of the configuration language which in 
this particular case being an ocaml API is documented through ocamldoc (here 
[1]). We could expose that in an alternate man page for assemblage, but in 
general it's better not to dilute/replicate documentation in too many places as 
it becomes painful to navigate and keep in sync. Besides in this case you are 
already likely to use that ocamldoc generated documentation anyway while you 
defining your configuration system.

Best,

Daniel

[1] 
https://github.com/dbuenzli/assemblage/blob/add38ef35f2cb8f585452f66f3695ab6ec7a417e/lib/assemblage.mli#L1125



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