Should --help text be consistently written to stdout?
Created by: varungandhi-src
For src
CLI, it looks like help text with --help
is output to either stderr or a mix of stdout and stderr.
For example, src --help
seems to output everything to stderr. src lsif upload --help
seems to output some text to stdout and some to stderr.
In either case, you need an extra 2&>1
if you want to pipe the output to a pager. My understanding is outputting help text to stderr is intentionally the default behavior for the flag
package. (https://github.com/golang/go/issues/17284, https://cs.opensource.google/go/go/+/refs/tags/go1.17.5:src/flag/flag.go;l=369;drc=refs%2Ftags%2Fgo1.17.5)
Since src
is likely to be used by more non-Go developers compared to Go developers, would it make sense to consistently output the help text to stdout instead?