On Wed, 2020-04-29 at 12:04 +0800, Kevin Buckley via blfs-dev wrote:
> At present, the Book has this argument to configure
> 
>             --with-passprompt="[sudo] password for %p: "
> 
> but doesn't explain the "%p", merely saying
> 
> --with-passprompt: This switch sets the password prompt.
> 
> which might leave the user wondering what the %p stands for.
> 
> The attached patch adds an explanation, taken from the sudo man page,
> as follows:
> 
> --with-passprompt: This switch sets the password prompt. The %p will
> be expanded to the name of the user whose password is being
> requested.
> 
> Having added that extra explanation though, I found that the text
> looked a bit "unwieldy",
> in that the text flows under the argument, and so version 2 of the
> patch replaces the
> "standard paragraph text", used for the command explanations, with a
> <variablelist">
> that makes things look a lot tidier, and has the advantage, at least
> in my rendering, of
> having the argument in the same font as it appears in the command
> instructions above
> the explanation.

Right now, we try to stick to the file template/template.xml style for
blfs. If we want to change the style, we have to do this for all the
packages in the book (~800)!

What you propose in V2 is what is used in the lfs book. It looks
slightly better when rendered, but is much less readable when editing.

Now, from my POV, command explanations in blfs are rationales
explaining why they are there, not really full explanations of the
commands themselves. The user is supposed to be able to find those
details by him/herself. So the explanations can be sketchy. But
explanations don't hurt OTOH... I've applied the first version at
r23041. Thanks.

And the <option> commands are there to explain why they are not used,
or to point to the right switch in case the user wants to add/remove
some functionalities, or use some optional package. Note that this is
not done in a systematic way, because it's a big job to do it
systematic, and specially to maintain when updating packages: what may
be true now may become wrong after a couple of version upgrades...

Pierre

-- 
http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-dev
FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html
Unsubscribe: See the above information page

Reply via email to