[Info-vax] SPM 3.4 installation issue on VMS 6.1

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2016-01-15 21:37:01 +0000, Bob Koehler said:

> In article <n798i4$r5u$1 at dont-email.me>, David Froble 
> <davef at tsoft-inc.com> writes:
>> 
>> In suggesting that someone read the entire "grey wall", you're just 
>> giving Steve  more ammunition to say VMS is behind the times.

On this topic, I have a surfeit of "ammunition".

>> After all, people don't have to  do that to use *ix or weendoze, do they?

For a baseline OS X Server configuration, I don't need to use the 
command line, and can have DNS, DHCP, mail, LDAP, web services, a 
software update (patch) server, a target for distributed backups, 
services and bots for the developer IDE, and various other services all 
configured and active, all as part of the primary installation.

Here's the integrated help for the management interface for the server 
configurations:

https://help.apple.com/serverapp/mac/5.0/

This interface is the rough analog to the OpenVMS Management Station 
and sysman and some other pieces, and the rough analog to the System 
Manager's and utilities manuals, as well as the file servers, 
Apache/SWS and other documentations.   This help is a little shorter 
than what the OpenVMS documentation has, and a whole lot more 
integrated.   The developer documentation is elsewhere.

If I do need to hit the command line (and for something beyond what is 
listed in the server help for command line documentation), then yes, 
I'm using the man pages.  Some really stupid inconsistencies in bash 
syntax don't help with that.

With some of the IDEs on the other hand, the developer documentation 
and code examples and the rest are all integrated and available.  Xcode 
is the first IDE that speeded up what I could do with the LSEDIT text 
editor and build tools, and not by a little bit.

>    Just try learning to use grep without at least a man page.

Or BACKUP, for that matter.

> I learned to use most of VMS by reading the help.  The little blue 
> shelf came later.

Different folks learn differently, obviously.   Few have the time to 
read the whole white wall.  (Not that the white wall and the layered 
product manuals are entirely current, as anybody that's read the 
various V8.4 UPDATE patch notes or that's configured SMTP recently will 
realize.)

>    OBTW, the last set I got was the white shelves.  But I rely on my 
> old CDs more often.

The man pages have built in navigation, using vim or emacs or your 
preferred keyboard mapping.   Forward and reverse navigation, text 
search, etc.   HELP is incredibly clumsy, in comparison.


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