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

[chris]

On 03/12/22 18:53, Simon Clubley wrote:
> 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.
>

It's a while since I used the grey wall, but to be fair, all the info
was there, it's just wasn't organised in a way that made things easy
to find. I remember doing some serial comms work years ago and needed
to consult 3 or 4 volumes to find the info, bits of which were
distributed across all of them. System service calls can be a bit
arcane as well, though that's probably just a matter of familiarity.

Compare that to the unix approach. Originally just a set of runoff
pages, very much on your own, but the methodology, ways and means of
accessing information, have changed. For example, plugin fopen() to a
search engine and you get dozens of the basic man page descriptions,
but also a range of pages with code snippets illustrating usage.
Much faster way to get productive. Solve the problem, not get bogged
down trying to find the information...

Chris