Your message dated Sun, 21 May 2006 16:42:11 +0200
with message-id <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
and subject line Bug#368328: which options are the most important?
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--- Begin Message ---
Package: exim4
Version: 4.50-8
Severity: normal
The exim4 man page doesn't say which command-line options are the most
important.
The options are listed in alphabetical order, so I don't know in which
order to read them to start learning about exim. This is especially
frustrating since there are so many options and they all seem to refer
to each other.
Furthermore, if I want to find documentation on a particular option, I
will use the text search functionality of my pager to search for it,
and I think most other users will do the same. Therefore the most
common reason for listing items in alphabetical order, namely so that
readers of paper literature can use a binary search to find a
particular item, doesn't apply here.
Whereas if the options would be described in order of importance, then
that would provide a natural progression in which people could learn
about the command.
And even if it were necessary to print the manual page on paper at
some point, I think it would still be better to have a pedagogical
ordering of the options, and to just include an alphabetized index at
the end of the document.
So that leaves me wondering why it was decided to list the command
line options in alphabetical order in the manual page.
-- Package-specific info:
Exim version 4.50 #1 built 27-May-2005 08:08:19
Copyright (c) University of Cambridge 2004
Berkeley DB: Sleepycat Software: Berkeley DB 4.2.52: (December 3, 2003)
Support for: iconv() IPv6 GnuTLS
Lookups: lsearch wildlsearch nwildlsearch iplsearch cdb dbm dbmnz dsearch nis
nis0 passwd
Authenticators: cram_md5 plaintext
Routers: accept dnslookup ipliteral manualroute queryprogram redirect
Transports: appendfile/maildir/mailstore autoreply lmtp pipe smtp
Fixed never_users: 0
Configuration file is /var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated
-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (1,
'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.14-1-k7
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Versions of packages exim4 depends on:
ii exim4-base 4.50-8 support files for all exim MTA (v4
ii exim4-daemon-light 4.50-8 lightweight exim MTA (v4) daemon
exim4 recommends no packages.
-- no debconf information
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
On 2006-05-21 Frederik Eaton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Package: exim4
> Version: 4.50-8
> Severity: normal
> The exim4 man page doesn't say which command-line options are the most
> important.
> The options are listed in alphabetical order, so I don't know in which
> order to read them to start learning about exim.
You should not read the manpage to "start learning about exim", the
manpage is just a short reference, not a manual. Read
/usr/share/doc/exim4-base/spec.txt.gz or
/usr/share/doc/exim4-doc-html/html/index.html if you want to learn
about exim.
> This is especially frustrating since there are so many options and
> they all seem to refer to each other.
> Furthermore, if I want to find documentation on a particular option, I
> will use the text search functionality of my pager to search for it,
> and I think most other users will do the same. Therefore the most
> common reason for listing items in alphabetical order, namely so that
> readers of paper literature can use a binary search to find a
> particular item, doesn't apply here.
> Whereas if the options would be described in order of importance, then
> that would provide a natural progression in which people could learn
> about the command.
> And even if it were necessary to print the manual page on paper at
> some point, I think it would still be better to have a pedagogical
> ordering of the options, and to just include an alphabetized index at
> the end of the document.
> So that leaves me wondering why it was decided to list the command
> line options in alphabetical order in the manual page.
Because
a) it is just a short reference
b) "importance" does not provide complete ordering of options.
I am quite familiar with exim but given two options I really cannot
tell which one is more important (Is -d or -qqf more important?), I
could probably order them into "used often", "internal" and
"everything else", but thats not useful.
closing.
cu andreas
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--- End Message ---
