nicer help?

[jbenet]

help should have a description of what this tool is used for, and an example. look at the man pages for wget and curl. so instead of:

Retrieve and save IPFS objects.

maybe:

ipget - retrieve and save IPFS objects

ipget is a tool for non-interactive downloading of files or objects from IPFS to the 
user's filesystem, similar to wget or curl. It supports /ipfs and /ipns paths. ipget
is meant to be used in scripts and pipelines.

or something.

[hackergrrl]

Nice! I think you're 100% right: wget and curl do a great job in most of these regards.

I think we can do better than their usage output though -- theirs is very terse:

wget

stephen // ~ $ wget
wget: missing URL
Usage: wget [OPTION]... [URL]...

Try `wget --help' for more options.

curl:

stephen // ~ $ curl
curl: try 'curl --help' or 'curl --manual' for more information

We shouldn't mimick blindly here. I think something that offers a description like you said and common options is better usage output. This can be complemented with excellent man pages.

Let's not copy these tools' --help output though (check it out; it's a massive many-page dump). The scope of ipget shouldn't get so massive that the list of possible invocations becomes that bloated.

---

Summary:

• usage output that describes the tool's use, provides an example, and describes usage
• a great man page that gives background on IPFS, what multiaddresses are, includes full step-by-step examples, and any other context a brand new user would need to understand the tool (curl --manual does a great job; talks about what URLs are, etc)
• should offer hooks throughout that invite the user to learn more about IPFS; act as a gateway into the IPFS community / suite of tools

[hackergrrl]

Broke these out into #45 and #46.