[Info-vax] VMS documentation, was: Re: Special deals on Tape Drives

[Simon Clubley]

On 2022-03-12, Scott Dorsey <kludge at panix.com> wrote:
> Simon Clubley  <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:
>>On 2022-03-08, Dave Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> So, you were born with this knowledge about Linux?
>>>
>>> I do so dislike double standards ...
>>
>>Huh ????
>>
>>_WHAT_ double standards ?
>
> I think his argument is that you had to learn both Linux and VMS operations
> somewhere.
>

Like I said Scott, _what_ double standards ?

At no point have I claimed to have learnt something without reading
the documentation and Bill's argument seems to be that he found the
VMS documentation more difficult to read than the Unix documentation
he has used.

I don't know what Bill found to be confusing, but I can see some people
being confused by all the VMS-specific stuff such as a way over-complex
descriptor system, as well as the fact the documentation needs to be
written at a lower level than with the Unix documentation to deal with
all the exposed structures that in Unix are hidden behind call interfaces,
C structs, etc.

There's a strong argument for using a clean and simple descriptor setup
instead of null terminated strings. Unfortunately, the VMS descriptor
setup is neither clean or simple.

I can also only imagine what a newcomer to VMS would think if you have
to get them up to speed on the combined 32-bit/64-bit program executables
and how that compares to how cleaner what they are used to is.

> And I don't know about you, but I find the Gray Wall and associated tutorial
> manuals to be a lot better-written and more useful than the Linux man pages.
>

I see the man pages as a mixture of reference material and online help
(and vastly better than the VMS help, which is written for a ASR-33 user
input device, is chopped up into little pieces, has no built-in search
capability, etc).

There are also full searchable reference manuals for all the GNU components
(and some other components) shipped as part of Linux.

I can also find full public documentation for Linux for the things I am
not allowed to know about in VMS or cannot implement easily (such as how
to add a new filesystem to VMS or how to write a new CLI).

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.