While trying Roo out the other day, I ran into a somewhat confusing scenario. I had just created a project that had persistence functionality and wanted to add spring security to it. Running the 'help' command showed no security-related commands, but a Google search showed me that a 'security setup' command should be possible. Running it did nothing, so I figured it had been taken out for whatever reason and went on. A while after creating my first controller, I noticed that the 'security setup' command was now available. A little bit of experimentation confirmed that the security command had a dependency on the web stuff being added. This causes a few problems: 1) I have no idea what commands might be available. 2) It might be hard to know why a particular command isn't available. In the case of, say, the entity command, it seems fairly obvious that I need to add persistence support before doing so. In other cases, however, it may not be as obvious - it wasn't clear to me upfront that I'd have to have to do something that resulted in a web.xml being created to use Spring Security. I have a few suggestions for improving this: 1) Show all commands that are currently disabled. This could be done below all of the available commands when you run 'help' or maybe it could be a flag like 'help --hidden-commands'. 2) Where possible, show a reason why the command is unavailable. Ie, for 'security setup', it might say something like "Command Unavailable: Requires a web.xml - create a scaffold or controller first to enable this command." 2) If you try to run a command that is valid, but unavailable, it would be nice if it let you know that it actually was a valid command, but it wasn't available for running (and preferably, why) instead of just saying "not found". This isn't a huge problem, but it does cause a bit of confusion (especially with first-time users) and it might be nice to make it a little easier to use. I took a look at the Roo source code and I have some ideas on how to make this work, so I'd be willing to investigate and discuss further and even work on a patch if this is something people are interested in.