reinstate --help

[dominictarr]

pretty much a complete rewrite of the internal help system.

now with muxrpcli@3 has each plugin own it's own help - plugins should have a help method that returns a data structure describing all commands and all their arguments. That has been implemented for ssb-db and ssb-gossip so far, but all the plugins will need that.

This data is also machine readable, which I think will lend to other useful things, such as validation of inputs. Also since it describes the patterns, it would be usable for other types of interface, http, cli or javascript.

[dominictarr]

modules that need "help"

• [x] ssb-replicate
• [x] ssb-friends
• [x] ssb-blobs
• [x] ssb-invite
• [x] ssb-peer-invites
• [x] ssb-query
• [x] ssb-ooo
• [x] ssb-device-address
• [x] ssb-search
• [x] ssb-identities
• [x] ssb-plugins

[staltz]

Could the help data structure be described somewhere as a convention? It smells like a module in itself (similar to multiserver-address).

[dominictarr]

@staltz yes, it's documented here: https://github.com/dominictarr/muxrpc-usage#data-structure

[dominictarr]

none of the plugins moved in https://github.com/ssbc/ssb-server/pull/664/files have commands, so merging that doesn't block this. Except ssb-plugins, which needs to be merged: https://github.com/ssbc/ssb-server/pull/653

[dominictarr]

@corlock had a problem that, running ssb-server inside of patchwork, couldn't use --help. I think whats happening is that --help is really, new, so that i'm not sure it's in the versions of modules that patchwork has?

[stale[bot]]

Is this still relevant? If so, what is blocking it? Is there anything you can do to help move it forward?