No sensible difference between commands doctor, about, and version

[julienrf]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Currently (scala 0.1.18 installed via cs install scala-experimental), the documentation says the following:

Doctor commands:
  doctor  Print details about this application

Miscellaneous commands:
  about    Print details about this application
  version  Print version

It is not clear what are the differences between doctor, about, and version.

I tried all of them and I got the following output:

$ scala doctor
Your scala version (0.1.18) is current.
scala can be updated by your package manager since it is correctly installed in only one location: .
Your scala is a native application.

$ scala about
Scala code runner version: 0.1.18
Scala version (default): 3.2.1
$ scala version
Scala code runner version: 0.1.18
Scala version (default): 3.2.1

Describe the solution you'd like

I suggest keeping the behavior of version as it is, but improving its documentation to the following:

Print the version of the scala runner and the default Scala version (unless specified in the project).

I suggest removing the about command, or renaming doctor into about (so, removing doctor) because “about” is more self-explanatory or intuitive to me (but that might be purely subjective).

[prolativ]

Was doctor command inspired by metals doctor? This thought made me realize that it would make sense to have a command not only to give a user some information about the scala runner itself, but also about the current configuration of a given project. But I would probably call it something like project or project-info instead of doctor.
Then running scala project . would read the using directives from all the sources and then print out the scala version, declared dependencies, compiler options etc., taking into account possible differences between configurations for different target platforms

[tgodzik]

I suggest removing the about command, or renaming doctor into about (so, removing doctor) because “about” is more self-explanatory or intuitive to me (but that might be purely subjective).

Makes sense from my side. And we should probably also include something like @prolativ suggested, but that should be a separate feature request.

[Gedochao]

@prolativ I extracted the project sub-command feature into a separate issue: #1722

@julienrf after some offline discussion, it seems we'll proceed with this ticket as follows:

• the about sub-command will be merged back to the version sub-command and removed
• the doctor sub-command will be removed, while its current features will be delivered through other means at a later date (possibly expanding the existing actionable diagnostics)
  • this is based on the current approach of making Scala CLI interactive, rather than something you should run the doctor sub-command with to see what's wrong
• this way, we'll go down to just having the version sub-command

[julienrf]

Thank you for addressing this issue promptly!