hamm@BIOVAX.RUTGERS.EDU.UUCP (03/26/87)
Hi - I'd appreciate comment about a possible major mistake I'm about to make. I run a VAX with mostly pretty inexperienced users, who primarily use specialized software packages (though not exclusively). I'm increasingly uncomfortable with telling these people to use HELP, because the VMS library is now so huge that it confuses them. Like many other sites, I've set up procedures which add my local help stuff to the vanilla VMS library, and to take them away again if I need to do that. But this just makes the library even larger. I've thought about setting up user libraries, but this puts the stuff my users want to get at most under one of those ugly "@" signs, whereas they still get all the vanilla stuff by default. What I'm thinking of doing is turning the default around, i.e., putting the local stuff in as the root library, and letting the VMS stuff be accessible with "@". I would of course define HLP$LIBRARY, so that if someone said "HELP COPY", they'd still get an answer. But if they said "HELP", they'd get a much smaller list of stuff that makes sense to them. Since everything would be accomplished by logical name definition, it would seem an easy solution to maintain though VMS updates, etc. But somehow, it feels like a bad idea. Has anyone else done this? Why is it a bad idea? What system management issues have I overlooked? How do the rest of you handle this problem? Thanks, Greg Hamm Rutgers Molecular Biology Computing Lab hamm@biovax.bitnet hamm@biovax.rutgers.edu ------ ------
TLI%Sargas@USC-OBERON.ARPA.UUCP (03/27/87)
What I'm thinking of doing is turning the default around, i.e., putting the local stuff in as the root library, and letting the VMS stuff be accessible with "@". I would of course define HLP$LIBRARY, so that if someone said "HELP COPY", they'd still get an answer. But if they said "HELP", they'd get a much smaller list of stuff that makes sense to them. Since everything would be accomplished by logical name definition, it would seem an easy solution to maintain though VMS updates, etc. But somehow, it feels like a bad idea. It is. During upgrades, VMS patches HELPLIB.HLB. We use the secondary libraries here for our local mods, and it seems to work reasonably well. Yes, it can be somewhat ugly, but you needn't type the "@LOCAL" portion if the key is not in the main library. While I'm at it, I'd like to complain about third-party vendors whose installation kits directly patch HELPLIB.HLB. This tends to cause system managers lots of pain the next time the system goes through a major upgrade. DEC gives you a clean copy of HELPLIB, and you now have to go through and remove the third party modules.... This is pretty silly. The "correct" thing to do would be to let the manager specify the library to add onto. Thus, if you want a "true" top level command you can get it, but for those of us with segmented, local systems, none of the standard system files get modified. Cheers, Tony ;-) -------