Re: help doesn't list all any longer

[Christoph Plattner]

Hello,

you are right concerning the organisation of classes in
OpenBoot, the "help" is not very good. But the principal
method is not so bad.

But your idea having a "help" and a help "--all" is better !
But IMO, there must be a "help --all" ....

The idea of having a built-in more in the terminal interface
is also very good, someone on the GRUB group also mentioned
that. 

For dumb terminals: If the terminal is a "real box", then
25 lines (or perhaps 24, as one line may be used for other 
stuff) is quite default. If the terminal is a "xterm",
"emacs", etc, no "more"-like handling is not necessary,
as a scrolling the "window" or editor is possible.

If we will make this configurable, the "--lines" parameter
(I like this idea) should default to `24' and there should
also be the value `none' (or `0' ?, `none' sounds better),
to disable this "more" feature, by holding LINES to invalid.

Depending on the key for further paging (<SPACE>, what ever),
for dumb terminals a succeeding <ENTER> should be ignored
(as the menu control in the new dumb terminal implementation).

Having such a "more"-like handling, I would prefer a single
coloumn of commands. The space for the short description
is too small and is sometimes cut by the following command.

Bye
Christoph

"Yoshinori K. Okuji" wrote:
> 
> At Tue, 05 Feb 2002 09:45:39 +0100,
> Christoph Plattner wrote:
> > *2* a "help" working on classes, like OpenBoot of Sun:
> >
> >       help booting
> >       help installing
> >       help console
> >       help memory
> >       help disks
> >
> > or similar.
> 
> I hate the OpenBoot way, as the classification is far from
> intuition. The worst point is that not all commands can be categorized
> clearly. In addition, it is bad that you cannot see a summary
> immediately by just typing "help".
> 
> > In solution *2* also a "help --all" may exist, listing
> > all commands in one coloum (left the command, right the
> > short description) plus the `more'-like output.
> 
> I didn't like to add a pager function into "help", because I didn't
> think it could be implemented for general purpose. A per-command
> implementation of a pager is really bad.
> 
> Now I have an idea: implementing a pager at the grub_putchar
> level. The pseudo code is:
> 
> enter_cmdline:
>         loop:
>                 show a prompt
>                 get a command-line
>                 set LINES to zero
>                 execute a command
>                 set LINES to an invalid value
> 
> grub_putchar:
>         if newline:
>                 if LINES is valid:
>                         increament LINES
>                         if LINES is equal to MAX_LINES:
>                                 show a prompt
>                                 wait for any key input
>                                 set LINES to zero
>                 else:
>                         print a newline
>         else:
>                 print a character
> 
> This could have GRUB to wait for user intervention whenever the screen
> is full, regardless of what command is executed. One problem is how to
> know MAX_LINES. You can get the geometry of a terminal mechanically
> with the console and VT100-compatible terminals, but that is impossible
> with dumb terminals. Adding "--lines=LINES" into "terminal", or have a
> new command "resize"?
> 
> However, I'm still thinking limiting commands shown with "help" is a
> Good Thing. I have heard that the number of GRUB commands upsets
> newbies several times, although most commands are not useful for them
> anyway. It is considerable whether commands useful for debugging GRUB
> should be displayed (by default), but, at least, it is a Good Thing to
> hide commands useless for interactive use. For example, who wants to
> see the usage of the command "lock" in the command-line interface?
> This is proven, because of the fact that noone has criticized that
> descriptions on menu-specific commands cannot be seen with "help".
> 
> Therefore, I'm now inclined to show descriptions on some commands by
> default and show all only if you specify "--all" to "help", like the
> UNIX command "ls".
> 
> Any comment is welcome...
> 
> Okuji

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