bitcoind and bitcoin-qt have a lot of files and it would be very helpful to have a FILES section, like most man pages have, that lists the files and directories with a short explanation of their purpose.
bitcoin-wallet should have the default wallet directory listed in the FILES section.
Note that we currently have doc/files.md, which would be a starting point for something like this.
I was thinking about this a little earlier and I'm not sure there is a single approach that I particularly like that I could think of. The issue I wanted to avoid was having manpages getting out of sync with doc/files.md (and with the binaries themselves).
This gives us a few options:
--help page output a files section to be parsed by help2man (lots of cpp changes needed. Not worth it IMO)doc/files.md to use a particular markdown format which could be parsed by a tool like ronn, which can parse markdown into roff, then have a conversion take place and include that file into the help2man process. This markdown would look something like (the files section) here.roff (looks like this), but then keeping things in sync becomes a pain without writing a test or something.Overall I think it's not worth the maintenance.
IMO we could add a FILES section with the default datadir and wallet dir, and reference doc/files.md file which is both in the source distribution and on github (but not in the binary distributions-- perhaps this could be changed?)
This issue hasn’t attracted much interest from other contributors in quite some time.
Given that, it doesn’t seem important enough to keep open indefinitely. I’m going to close it for now due to lack of activity, but pull requests or renewed discussion are always welcome.
Comment here if you think this shoudl be re-opened.