padpowell (08/26/82)
While UNIX is a pretty good working environment for several reasons,
there are some minor, but annoying problems for casual and novice users. They
can be classified into two groups:
- inconsistent command syntax
- lack of a cross reference into documentation.
Either of these by themselves are not serious, but the two together are
very annoying. I would like to propose the following "band-aid" approaches,
which are not repeat not solutions to the problem.
Help facility:
Help would provide a short summary of the command syntax, and the acceptable
options. Included would be a pointer to further documents. For example:
% help
help [-k keywords] [command name]
see: "man help"
Standards for user interface:
Publish in some permanent fashion (i.e.- make it part of a widely available
documentation distribution system; perhaps in SIGOPS) a set of command conven-
tions. Then put up some pointers in the system for people who are going to
add user level commands to the system. While this has been done and perhaps
is available to "systems level personnel" I think it deserves wider publica-
tion.
On-line Index:
Make available an index into documentation or references, which is available
on line. I am thinking of a facility similar to the lookbib system, which
looks up bibliography references. This would require a keyword facility to be
added. However, if somebody had a nice keyword extraction algorithm (and I
have seen several nice ones), and could make it available for general use,
this would provide one solution to the problem. The other problem is the
space needed to maintain the documentation and cross reference index. I have
no idea how big this would be, but it surely cannot be more than 10 percent
of the total documentation size (wild quess).
I would like to hear other peoples comments and suggestions (please send
flames to /dev/null). Please send them to me by mail, and I will be glad to
summarize them into a digest.
Patrick Powell (...!decvax!utzoo!watmath!padpowell)
CCNG, U. Waterloo, Waterloo, Ont. Canada