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Matt Joyce (matt at nycresistor.com) wrote:
> >  3. I think it would be good if the HIG recommended that, at least
> >     when subcommands are permitted, single arguments '--help' and
> >     'help' always generate identical output:
> >
> >       https://bugs.launchpad.net/keystone/+bug/936399
> >       https://review.openstack.org/#/c/6460/
> 
> Same for Version ( --version )

Good point!  I've added some draft text to the wiki page for that,
partially pinched from:

  http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Command_002dLine-Interfaces

As you can see, the GNU standards go into great detail regarding
--version; I don't know if we want to be as stringent, particularly
regarding copyright / license notices, but there's some good food for
thought there.

> >  5. I think it would be good if the HIG specified what sort of help
> >     text should be included alongside error messages of (say) the
> >     "you didn't give the right number of arguments" variety, and
> >     whether the error message should appear before or after that help
> >     text.  My vote is after, because it's far easier for the human
> >     eye to locate the end of a command's output than the beginning,
> >     especially if the beginning has scrolled off the top of the
> >     terminal.
> 
> I wonder if this event tracking is relevant to metering.  At the very
> least it could be relevant to an audit log / revision history.
> 
> Curious if that's outside the scope of the CLI.   For one, I believe
> it would be worthwhile to be able to integrate with the APIs to
> provide a recall of past events and results.

Agreed - while server-side auditing is a more important component than
client-side, having both sounds potentially useful to me too.  And
while it's outside the scope of a CLI HIG discussion, it's
nevertheless relevant to any work on a unified CLI.