Help scraping: track changes to CLI tools by recording their –help using Git

Craziness of AWS cli tool complexity aside, I really like the general idea of this.

As someone who tends to set aside an afternoon for Debian upgrades every couple of years¹, I'd love a database I could query with release/package_name to see what has changed in an interface.

As Simon notes in his post simply relying on ChangeLog/NEWS files which have hugely varying levels of granularity(when they exist at all) isn't a good indicator of what has changed.

If all packages had the structure and thoroughness of git's release notes this probably wouldn't be needed. However, we have to live in the world we have, not the one we want.

Edit to add: If you decide to make this yourself don't blindly run `for bin (${^path}/*(N*:A)) { $bin --help ... }`, as some tools have exciting side-effects beyond just attempting to pop open a window. This message paid for with JNRowe's foolishness.

¹ Which often means I'm about six months late for the release party given scheduling priorities. And, a month after my Bullseye upgrade I've still got around twenty pending todo items for setup changes I'd like to see.