[Info-vax] Radical command line suggestion

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-03-20 13:46:49 +0000, Jan-Erik Soderholm said:

> Right, publish an updated "Getting Started" manual then.
> You have to start *somewhere*...

You're undoubtedly remembering your introduction to and your education 
into OpenVMS.  Now?  Increasingly, this area is increasingly canned 
solutions and task guides and recipes.

Have you learned and used and become adept on a different operating 
system in the past, say, five or ten years?  Or learned and started 
using a different language, for that matter?  If you have, then you've 
probably noticed that the associated materials and resources have 
changed markedly from when you got going with OpenVMS and whatever 
languages you were using.

These newer materials and task guides and recipes are targeted and 
largely self-contained, with links to other related discussions.   (As 
mentioned, the TIMA / AskQ materials — Philippe Vouters was using the 
TIMA-style documentation format and contents for his postings; see 
<https://web.archive.org/web/20120618193456/http://vouters.dyndns.org/tima> 
if his site is still offline — shows some of what DEC was doing in this 
area.)  Beyond the text content, the various OpenVMS documentation 
presentation tools just don't lend themselves well to this organization.

You (Jan-Erik) mention new users not necessarily finding HELP.  But the 
issues and the limitations go far beyond that.   Or the expectations 
have changed, depending on how you want to look at it.  The OpenVMS 
documentation organization and the content and the tools are 
effectively generations old, and this whether referencing user 
interface generations or the people.   While there are many existing 
OpenVMS users that are familiar with and quite fond of how VMS 
documentation works and is organized, new VMS users and existing VMS 
folks working on other platforms just don't have the same expectations. 
  Reading a wall of text is — and I unfortunately end up suggesting it 
for new users far too often, as AFAIK there's no better way currently 
freely available — to get to where the HELP is a reasonable and 
understandable resource just isn't something that many folks now expect 
to have to do.  The folks that were recently posting suggestions around 
video training and related materials are also referencing these 
limitations.  Modern documentation now incorporates images and audio 
and video media.

Learning a large part of an OS takes a long time, and is rather less 
productive for most folks, and pointless for some tasks.  In the case 
of OpenVMS, few are going to want to make that investment until and 
unless VSI is a whole lot more successful, too.  Hence the availability 
of task guides, and of increasingly standalone documentation — manuals 
that are cross-referenced with other materials, but that don't expect 
you to have deep expertise in DCL syntax or the format of some of the 
HELP file entries that do have single-command examples.  Some don't 
have even that, of course.  There are few full-on examples, such as a 
backup procedure.

Yes, VSI has a huge amount of work, and they need to become sustainable 
before they can start tackling many of the issues with the current 
environment.


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