----- Original Message ----- From: "Ken D'Ambrosio" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Rich C" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "GNHLUG" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2002 5:53 PM Subject: Re: Interesting Newbie article at CentraLUG.org
> On Wed, 2002-02-13 at 17:45, Rich C wrote: > > > Right, the man pages are a reference work. That's the way I have always > > considered them. You don't start reading the reference section of a > > programmers manual to learn a new language, do you? Of course not. Man pages > > are NOT a help system. For the CLI, there IS NO HELP SYSTEM. It's as simple > > as that. > > Okay, I'll bite: VMS's help was good, but it wasn't like it was amazing > or anything. Fairly often, I had to hit the proverbial "documentation > wall": that stack o' VMS manuals that took up a whole damn table. If > man pages == "NO HELP SYSTEM", then what *WOULD* you consider a help > system? I know that MS's "help", as convenient as it may be to hit F1, > rarely helps me... whereas man pages usually do, and almost always point > me in the right direction -- something that MS rarely does. Bottom > line: what do you want for help? An AI assistant to help you with > everything? If so, I've got some bad news for you... > You're right, VMS's help system wasn't amazing. The thing that VMS had going for it IMO is that it had, in addition to the help system, mostly "english word" commands. You could do help, see a list of commands, get a pretty good idea of which one you were looking for (COPY did copying, DIRectory did a directory, BACKUP did backups.) From there you could drill down to what you wanted. With UNIX, even if you got a list of commands, which one does backups? "tar"? how is a newbie supposed to know that? (So then why doesn't "feather" do restores?) What is needed in a help system is something like what VMS had, but for subject keywords like backup, restore, copy, directory, and stuff like that. The help system doesn't really have to do much more than reference the proper command to use, and say "Oh, you want to copy something? Well, if it's just a file or two, see "cp." If it's an entire directory structure, see "tar." If you want to copy a partition or disk, see "dd." Then the man page can take over. Rich Cloutier President, C*O SYSTEM SUPPORT SERVICES www.sysupport.com ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
