-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Emil Beinroth wrote: > On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 04:31:11PM -0400, Chuck Robey wrote: >> I was reading in the eix man page about eix-sync, and it gave about a >> million options, but nowhere did I see if give a useable format for the >> options, > > Quoting from the manpage .. > > /etc/eixrc > Global configuration file. The variables in ~/.eixrc or from the > environment can override the variables set in this file. > See ~/.eixrc. > > [snip] > > ~/.eixrc > Per-user configuration file. The variables in this file can be > overridden by environment variables. You can use a shell-like > syntax to set the following variables. ^^^^^^^^^^ > ^^^^^^ >
Oh, I see. The system which I ssh'ed to, where _I DID_ check /etc/eixrc and foound it empty had no package for eix installed, and I didn't know then it was an added package. I didn't miss that, but, as I have said before (enough to where I know I'm getting to be boring) that examples, eithout having the syntax explained (and the man page doesn't) is a very bad habit of Unix, because it seems that every programmer assumes you're only going to be using their own task when they give you an example, so when you don't do exactly what tey say, you're just SOL. God, I have had enough of that (sorry, as you probably can tell my now, that's a real hot button of mine by now). >> I wanted to have a option line setting but I couldn't tell if it was >> like >> >> PRINT_SLOTS=yes or >> PRINT_SLOTS yes or >> PRINT_SLOTS="yes" or >> PRINT_SLOTS "yes" > > As said above, eix uses shell-style configuration files so #1 and #3 > should be fine. > >> There are other permutations. Howcome the man page doesn't give something >> as obvious as that? Darn huge man page, after I initially found the >> PRINT_SLOTS defintion, it took me 10 more minutes to find out that it was >> supposed to go into /etc/eix-sync. > > Are you sure? Normally that stuff goes into /etc/eixrc or ~/.eixrc. Well, I had no ~/.eixrc. > >> It gives a great amoount of info, but maybe it could stand some better >> organization, to let things get found. > > Martin actually acknowledges this problem in the "BUGS" section: "There > are too many features: The documentation and configuration has become > too complicated." So it definitely could. Well, that's not really an insurmountable problem. It makes writing the man page hard, but if it's well written, it can still be read. Look at the grep man page. L:ong time back (LONG time, I mean V.7 days), at first there was only a grep writeup, not a man page. It gave two very well detailed examples, but realizing how grep was set up, the writeup was the next thing to useless, and I couldn't make any use of it until I finally located a man page for it that gave all the options. You need to give at least a bare summary of what each and every flag does, THEN an example can be a really useful thing, but alone it sucks.. It's a real problem that it seems to be the current way for programmers to get out of having to really document things. Hey, I'm not perfect, I don't like writing docs either. The only typesetter I do well with is troff, and when things changed to xml, I can't write things up anymore. I can do some nice things with troff (even write macros) but that doesn't get me too far ennymore. > > The *huge* list of variables could be split up into sections, for > example all the "MATCH_*" stuff could go into a section called "Changing > default match-fields". > But this approach is probably be better suited for formats that support > links, so we can have a nice table of contents. info-pages spring to > mind, but I hear many people don't like those. > > Another way to reduce the size and complexity could be to split the > whole thing into multiple documents, one for each tool (eix, update-eix, > eix-diff and so on..). > > Any thoughts or suggestions on this topic would be greatly appreciated. > > Cheers, Emil > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.4 (FreeBSD) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFH3w6hz62J6PPcoOkRAhZiAJ9mZnYntMaF5ZQseim1hPDErpHLqwCgi3tO VXvFW4Rcr2rHVj8+pr+E4AY= =krWt -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
