Rename Arg::help to Arg::about

[pksunkara]

Rename Arg::help to Arg::about to make it consistent with App. Similarly Arg::long_help. Also rename the respective field names.

[creativcoder]

Hey @pksunkara, Can I take this up?

[CreepySkeleton]

@creativcoder Sure, go ahead!

[Dylan-DPC-zz]

I don't see the point of renaming this, it will be another change for a user upgrading from 2.x land to 3.x without much reason.

[pksunkara]

There is much reason because help in App is different semantically than help in Arg which would end up confusing the users. This should fix it and make it consistent.

[CreepySkeleton]

As a compromise, we can rename it but leave the old help, deprecating it.

[Dylan-DPC-zz]

Help is more synonymous with CLIs and the usage is understood. I don't see the value of this tbh

[pksunkara]

Help is about the full help message. About concerns only the description.

I don't want to keep Arg::help behaviour the same and keep it deprecated. I want to make it similar to how App::help behaves, by making it replace the full help text of an argument rather than the generated one.

The generated help contains other things like possible values, default values etc.. which should completely be replaced if help was specified.

[CreepySkeleton]

I want to make it similar to how App::help behaves, by making it replace the full help text of an argument rather than the generated one.

So, you are going to change the behavior of a very frequently used function without changing its signature. If you ask me - or don't, but I'll tell you anyway - this is spectacularly bad idea. Just because old habits die hard. This will spread a lot of confusion among users, a lot more than the benefit from having the API unified will ever be. If you want to pull such a drastic change - rename the method.

For the record - I kind of see Dylan's point. People are already got used to about/help difference. But I also see why we may want to make the API consistent.

My call - let's ask for forgiveness, not for permission. We do this, we push the beta outdoors, receive feedback, revert if the feedback turns out to be largely negative.

[pksunkara]

Just because old habits die hard. This will spread a lot of confusion among users

I agree which is why it took me such a long time to create the issue. I had been thinking about this since I started working on clap. It kept bothering me that the help related stuff is very inconsistent between App and Arg. I want to do a HelpBase which extracts the common stuff and make it customisable.

[epage]

I've had some first-hand confusion over this change and have started #2937 about the specific problem I had, while trying to acknowledge all of the other needs. Hopefully we can find a good solution.