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

I really didn't expect an answer to my idea, but I like the way that
you've taken it.  If you were to list things by the application that
installed them you'd have to write a whole hell of a lot less -- which
sacrificing very little real-world look-up time.......

Drew Northup, N1XIM

On Wed, 2003-08-13 at 11:44, Heather Stern wrote:
> 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]
> --->*<--- Starshine Technical Services - * - [email protected]
>   ' | `   Sysadmin Support and Training  |        (800) 938-4078
> 
> _______________________________________________
> lnx-bbc mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://zork.net/mailman/listinfo/lnx-bbc