[Info-vax] Radical command line suggestion

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-03-19 21:41:08 +0000, JF Mezei said:

> On 15-03-19 17:29, mcleanjoh at gmail.com wrote:
> 
>> It should also be remembered that HELP has the advantage that most VMS 
>> commands correspond to plain English,
> 
> 
> Nop. HELP's main advantage over man is the list of qualifiers below 
> generic description of command, and you can then type which qualifier 
> you want info on.

HELP has the main advantages of being a familiar part of VMS, and have 
adequate content quality.  Beyond that, HELP is a laughably archaic 
tool that's basically useless for any purpose beyond a quick reminder 
for those already familiar with OpenVMS; beyond its originally intended 
purpose.   That is, if you're familiar with HELP and with the 
documentation, you can get around.  If you're new or need to do 
anything beyond looking up qualifiers for a specific command, HELP is 
absurdly difficult to use, and the text of the help libraries grossly 
inadequate.

As for navigating a list of qualifiers within HELP, that works if you 
know what the qualifiers do or which one(s) you need to use.  As a 
reminder.  Otherwise, you can end up using * to display them all, and 
with no search and no reverse paging and such.   With man, a user can 
easily search for keywords and can page around as needed, and that can 
make finding and reading the necessary documentation easier.

> With man, you have to scroll thorugh pages of text scanning to find if
> one of the switches is what you are looking for.

But then man is an absurdly bad tool, and with variable content 
quality.  Beyond its advantages over HELP (including search and a pager 
and a variety of other details thanks to less)

Seriously folks, if you think the choice here is between HELP and man, 
then you've apparently forgotten there are other tools, and that 
programmers can write new tools.

If anyone here thinks the HELP context is good and cannot be improved, 
you probably already know VMS and have read the manuals and haven't 
recently tried to figure out how to do tasks and sequences from the 
HELP contents or haven't tried to figure out OpenVMS commands or calls 
that have — *gasp* — poor documentation.  Documentation can always be 
improved.  Always.  OpenVMS documentation was good for its time and 
most of us are familiar with it.  Now?  The combination of HELP and the 
current non-task-oriented OpenVMS documentation is very weak — those 
guides just aren't available in HELP, and you can't easily rummage in 
HELP.  (man can fall down for the same reasons.)

If anyone here thinks the man page content for Unix is bad, go read 
some of the newer Unix man page content.  That content has been 
improving, and parts are equal to or arguably superior to the OpenVMS 
HELP.

But again, my complaints are with the HELP tool.  Using man is just 
easier, as you can navigate around in the HELP content text — whether 
that text is good or bad — much more easily than with HELP.  Now using 
a more modern tool — whether that's info or Lynx-based or something 
wholly different or new — is certainly preferable to either one.  I do 
not see man as lacking room for improvements or for replacement.  (The 
info folks certainly thought so too, for instance.)

As for more modern alternatives, running a VMS HELP server would be 
interesting; then you could access the OpenVMS help from a remote 
client, since that's the way many of you access OpenVMS anyway.  
Install and integrate and serve the HTML documentation, either on a 
standard HTTPS port, or on a variant port.   But then the OpenVMS 
HTML-format documentation has issues, too — that's still built for the 
era of printed books, and really doesn't have much in the way of 
linkages between those units, nor are the task guides — in the case of 
the programming task guides, some of that was once available via the 
TIMA / AskQ path for a while, but that's long since been pulled offline 
— and the task guides were never integrated with OpenVMS.




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