| 1 |
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- |
| 2 |
Hash: SHA1 |
| 3 |
|
| 4 |
Emil Beinroth wrote: |
| 5 |
> On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 04:31:11PM -0400, Chuck Robey wrote: |
| 6 |
>> I was reading in the eix man page about eix-sync, and it gave about a |
| 7 |
>> million options, but nowhere did I see if give a useable format for the |
| 8 |
>> options, |
| 9 |
> |
| 10 |
> Quoting from the manpage .. |
| 11 |
> |
| 12 |
> /etc/eixrc |
| 13 |
> Global configuration file. The variables in ~/.eixrc or from the |
| 14 |
> environment can override the variables set in this file. |
| 15 |
> See ~/.eixrc. |
| 16 |
> |
| 17 |
> [snip] |
| 18 |
> |
| 19 |
> ~/.eixrc |
| 20 |
> Per-user configuration file. The variables in this file can be |
| 21 |
> overridden by environment variables. You can use a shell-like |
| 22 |
> syntax to set the following variables. ^^^^^^^^^^ |
| 23 |
> ^^^^^^ |
| 24 |
> |
| 25 |
|
| 26 |
Oh, I see. The system which I ssh'ed to, where _I DID_ check /etc/eixrc |
| 27 |
and foound it empty had no package for eix installed, and I didn't know |
| 28 |
then it was an added package. I didn't miss that, but, as I have said |
| 29 |
before (enough to where I know I'm getting to be boring) that examples, |
| 30 |
eithout having the syntax explained (and the man page doesn't) is a very |
| 31 |
bad habit of Unix, because it seems that every programmer assumes you're |
| 32 |
only going to be using their own task when they give you an example, so |
| 33 |
when you don't do exactly what tey say, you're just SOL. God, I have had |
| 34 |
enough of that (sorry, as you probably can tell my now, that's a real hot |
| 35 |
button of mine by now). |
| 36 |
|
| 37 |
>> I wanted to have a option line setting but I couldn't tell if it was |
| 38 |
>> like |
| 39 |
>> |
| 40 |
>> PRINT_SLOTS=yes or |
| 41 |
>> PRINT_SLOTS yes or |
| 42 |
>> PRINT_SLOTS="yes" or |
| 43 |
>> PRINT_SLOTS "yes" |
| 44 |
> |
| 45 |
> As said above, eix uses shell-style configuration files so #1 and #3 |
| 46 |
> should be fine. |
| 47 |
> |
| 48 |
>> There are other permutations. Howcome the man page doesn't give something |
| 49 |
>> as obvious as that? Darn huge man page, after I initially found the |
| 50 |
>> PRINT_SLOTS defintion, it took me 10 more minutes to find out that it was |
| 51 |
>> supposed to go into /etc/eix-sync. |
| 52 |
> |
| 53 |
> Are you sure? Normally that stuff goes into /etc/eixrc or ~/.eixrc. |
| 54 |
|
| 55 |
Well, I had no ~/.eixrc. |
| 56 |
|
| 57 |
> |
| 58 |
>> It gives a great amoount of info, but maybe it could stand some better |
| 59 |
>> organization, to let things get found. |
| 60 |
> |
| 61 |
> Martin actually acknowledges this problem in the "BUGS" section: "There |
| 62 |
> are too many features: The documentation and configuration has become |
| 63 |
> too complicated." So it definitely could. |
| 64 |
|
| 65 |
Well, that's not really an insurmountable problem. It makes writing the |
| 66 |
man page hard, but if it's well written, it can still be read. Look at the |
| 67 |
grep man page. L:ong time back (LONG time, I mean V.7 days), at first |
| 68 |
there was only a grep writeup, not a man page. It gave two very well |
| 69 |
detailed examples, but realizing how grep was set up, the writeup was the |
| 70 |
next thing to useless, and I couldn't make any use of it until I finally |
| 71 |
located a man page for it that gave all the options. You need to give at |
| 72 |
least a bare summary of what each and every flag does, THEN an example can |
| 73 |
be a really useful thing, but alone it sucks.. It's a real problem that it |
| 74 |
seems to be the current way for programmers to get out of having to really |
| 75 |
document things. |
| 76 |
|
| 77 |
Hey, I'm not perfect, I don't like writing docs either. The only |
| 78 |
typesetter I do well with is troff, and when things changed to xml, I can't |
| 79 |
write things up anymore. I can do some nice things with troff (even write |
| 80 |
macros) but that doesn't get me too far ennymore. |
| 81 |
|
| 82 |
> |
| 83 |
> The *huge* list of variables could be split up into sections, for |
| 84 |
> example all the "MATCH_*" stuff could go into a section called "Changing |
| 85 |
> default match-fields". |
| 86 |
> But this approach is probably be better suited for formats that support |
| 87 |
> links, so we can have a nice table of contents. info-pages spring to |
| 88 |
> mind, but I hear many people don't like those. |
| 89 |
> |
| 90 |
> Another way to reduce the size and complexity could be to split the |
| 91 |
> whole thing into multiple documents, one for each tool (eix, update-eix, |
| 92 |
> eix-diff and so on..). |
| 93 |
> |
| 94 |
> Any thoughts or suggestions on this topic would be greatly appreciated. |
| 95 |
> |
| 96 |
> Cheers, Emil |
| 97 |
> |
| 98 |
|
| 99 |
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- |
| 100 |
Version: GnuPG v2.0.4 (FreeBSD) |
| 101 |
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org |
| 102 |
|
| 103 |
iD8DBQFH3w6hz62J6PPcoOkRAhZiAJ9mZnYntMaF5ZQseim1hPDErpHLqwCgi3tO |
| 104 |
VXvFW4Rcr2rHVj8+pr+E4AY= |
| 105 |
=krWt |
| 106 |
-----END PGP SIGNATURE----- |
| 107 |
-- |
| 108 |
gentoo-user@l.g.o mailing list |
Archives