bitcoin-cli help detail to show full help for all RPCs #29163

Prints to stdout a concatenation of full help text as if you had run bitcoin-cli help on every RPC. This allows you to search help text when you can't remember the name of an RPC.

For example, suppose you remember there is an RPC that shows you orphaned chain branches but can't remember its name. This PR allows you to run:

bitcoin-cli helpdetail | less

and then search for "orphan", you'd immediately find getchaintips. It shows the category before each RPC's help text, which also helps visually separate the individual RPC helps.

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Force pushed to add release note (not sure if this is important enough to have a release note for, but just in case), and also updated the help help text to document the detail argument:

$ bitcoin-cli help help
help ( "command" )

List all commands, or get help for a specified command.

Arguments:
1. command    (string, optional, default=all commands) The command to get help on, or "detail" for full help on all commands

Result:
"str"    (string) The help text

Concept NACK on the top commit: having each one in a separate file is nice.

Concept NACK on the top commit: having each one in a separate file is nice.

I can remove it, but may I ask why, I assume that the purpose of the test writing to the files is in case something goes wrong in the formatting of the strings (and the test fails), the files might help the developer identify the problem. (Otherwise why not just write to /dev/null, which would still test the string formatting?) When the test completes successfully, all these files are deleted anyway.

If this PR makes the test write to one large file, isn't that going to still test all the string formatting?

Concept NACK - I dont think this is needed due to the ./bitcoin-cli help to view all cmds, and ./bitcoin-cli help [cmd] to get additional information about that command

I dont think this is needed

I agree this is not needed, but does every change have to be "needed"? Can't it just be an improvement? This would be helpful to me personally, and by extension, I would expect to others as well.

utACK c6b68c29707770a17617d7d6af572d7460170eab.

This would be helpful to me

Being able to search through the descriptions of all commands would be helpful.

This PR allows you to run: bitcoin-cli help detail

This approach seems awkward. Is there a better UX option here? What about bitcoin-cli helpdetail?

Is there a better UX option here? What about bitcoin-cli helpdetail?

I agree your suggestion would be better, or maybe even bitcoin-cli -helpdetail (with a dash) because as it is now, "detail" seems like the name of an RPC. I'll look into what it would take to do either of those, thanks for the suggestion.

Concept NACK on the top commit: having each one in a separate file is nice.

I can remove it, but may I ask why,

It's nicer to diff the entire directories IMO.

@luke-jr I don't understand who would be doing a diff or why, but that's okay, I force-push-removed that commit. Probably better to minimize the patch anyway. Thanks!

@epiccurious

What about bitcoin-cli helpdetail?

Force-pushed your suggestion, thanks again, I like that much better.

Aside: I had mentioned as a possibility: bitcoin-cli -helpdetail (with the dash), but that's not as good, because bitcoin-cli help doesn't have a dash, and this should look similar. Also, dash arguments are processed by bitcoin-cli, and that's not the case here.

Force-pushed to fix CI failures. @luke-jr can you please remove your NACK now that I've deleted the test commit you disapproved of? Thanks.

Force pushed to rebase to latest master. @luke-jr, @epiccurious, can you review? Thanks.

Prints to stdout a concatenation of full help text as if you had run bitcoin-cli help on every RPC.

Approach NACK to adding a bunch of code to Bitcoin Core to do this. Could you consider instead running:

bitcoin-cli help | grep -o '^\S*' | xargs -I {} bitcoin-cli help {} > rpc_help_list.txt

That doesn't quite work for me, but this does (using Ubuntu, maybe it depends on the OS):

bitcoin-cli help | grep -o '^[a-z]*' | xargs -I {} bitcoin-cli help {}

This doesn't print the == category == before the help for each command, which also makes it a little difficult to see where each command begins and ends, but I guess it's not worth making this many changes, as you say.