[Info-vax] VMS v8.4 Documentation CDROM bugs

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-05-07 06:23:59 +0000, Jan-Erik Soderholm said:

> Now, in todays web centric world, who would need a documentation *CD*?
> What is there on that CD that is not available on-line?
> 
> (Yes, I know of the temporary troubles at HP, but I expect that to be 
> solved in a few days...)
> 
> Haven't used or seen a doc-CD in decades.

Yes, accessing the documentation via the web was pretty good, and still 
better than a physical CD or DVD.   The web-based approach has some 
issues though, around keeping local caches of current documentation for 
offline and for slow-network use.   Yes, fast searches are also 
possible, given an effective and functional search engine indexing the 
web site.

In more recent times, I've become quite fond of tools such as Dash 
<https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dash-api-docs-snippets/id458034879?mt=12>, 
which allows the selected documentation to be cached locally, and can 
maintain and update the documentation cache, and collects together a 
wide variety of documentation.   Bash, C, Rust, SQLite, Objective C, OS 
X, PostgreSQL, man pages and a whole pile of other documentation is all 
cached locally.   Among other upstream resources, Dash also integrates 
with the Stack Q&A sites, so you can cache those discussions locally, 
too.    Combine this with the gonzo-speed OS X Spotlight search — 
OpenVMS SEARCH is utterly *glacial* in comparison — maintaining a local 
library becomes easy, and the results are very effective.

Also fond of the integrated and context-sensitive information available 
in Xcode, an IDE which completely and utterly demolishes LSEDIT.

But yes, the Y2K-era documentation web site that HP implements for 
OpenVMS has and will work (eventually), and the PDF files can be 
manually cached.

FWIW, the (other) common reason for CDs and for local caches of 
documentation is to keep copies of documentation for retired products.  
In your particular case, you probably have a cache of AlphaServer 
server documentation, for instance.  For others, it's the docs for some 
ancient OpenVMS version, or some long-retired product.


-- 
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