Re: proggy list................was Re: site FAQ - question missing...

On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 11:44:26PM -0400, Drew Northup N1XIM wrote:
> Umm...........yeah...................that's a big problem.  Those of us
> who swear by Tom's RTBT always know what's on the disk because it tells
> us.  Now, I don't think that having the LNX-BBC do that at boot with
> 1000+ programs is going to sit well, but providing a file with a simple
> listing (culled from the build scripts, perhaps automagically) would
> certianly help--oh and a "type BLAH to find out what you have here"
> would help too.
> 
> I'd write up the "scriptlet" thingy needed if I knew how or had the time
> to learn...........

Well, let's see.  Our nearest obvious competitor, tomsrtbt, pesters the 
newly logging in root user with:

you have bla bla foo bing baz bar ..
... several lines wortth of program names
... bla bla ginger bla bla.

We obviously have a lot more than that, but the interface of saying
simply, you have "nn" could be handy.   I remember thinking very happy
thoughts when it just gave me the root prompt instead of dumping me into
a huge readme.  I like the readme, it's useful, but now, I wonder if
people don't read it because it can be assumed to be absent.

So, prefacing giving them the prompt with
   You have 1000+ programs. Type 'BLAH*' to list them all.
   To reach the internet, try 'trivial-net-setup'.
   For some readme files, type 'help'.

+ If anybody feels inclined to having something count them and burn 
  this in that'd be amusing, otherwise say 1000+ or over 1000.
* I have forgotten what BLAH is. I don't need a list, I'm soaked in the
  dev tree, so in my case it'd be more to check if something -wasn't-
  there...

But 3 or 4 lines isn't any more expensive than most people's MOTD file 
and frankly it's much shorter and more useful than Debian's standard
one.

However, I favor the idea of having some notefiles on the disc,
especially those that are most useful at single user mode.  Perhaps 
something like the copyright mechanism we now use, could be used to
offer up doc files as well.  A URL can be offered in which case the
suggested "it'll need the net you know" wrapper could be applied.
In fact I'll go one better and say that we could prep a single html
file, which lists these helpful URLs attached to their program name.
Any local files can just be read that way - lynx is quite a decent
pager, and I'm sure the same can be said for the other two textmode
browsers. Any full URLs will of course require the net, but then 
the browser will pretty much say so 
	(trying to connect to www.tldp.org...)

If combined with a 1 line description of what the program is supposed
to be, we get the full program list, a "what the hell are these things"
list, local doc pages (maybe stripped man pages, maybe 2 paragraphs by
the pkg maintainer), and URLs to full docs all in one thingy.  Which
starts to make it worth the space of the wasted HTML tagstuff.

The only problem that remains then is that most packages cough up more
than one binary, and each might want a little documentation. Still, if
we accept the Blurb from "package description goes here" in the
Makefile, and since the copyright widget already supports multiple
files, I don't think it's really that hard to give a shot.

  . | .   Heather Stern                  |         [email protected]
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