Hi! > I think it is a waste to invest a lot of energy in > having _programmers_ write up more than simple bare-bones text > documentation AT THIS TIME when:
> - FreeDOS hasn't released non-beta version 1.0. On the other hand, many people are happy with the current version, which means that there is less motivation to fix, say, PRINT/PRINTQ or other less-often-used tools which are required for 1.0 according to our self-selected goals. > - People are still debugging operational problems. As in particular EMM386/HIMEM showed, having more users helps a lot in finding problems. So we should not limit ourself to those users who know so much about DOS that they can fix bugs themselves and who can use source codes as man page replacement. > - End-user familiarity with many of the same options from MS-DOS > continuing all the way into WinXP CMD remains comparatively high. True, but you miss the fine but important differences. If you try some MS EMM386 options with FreeDOS EMM386, and you get a syntax error, then you do need a FreeDOS EMM386 man page to figure out what happened. If you have a FreeDOS EMM386 man page, you can find special FreeDOS goodies like X=TEST which you would have never guessed to exist just from your MS DOS experience. Last but not least the developers know very well how their programs should be used. They maintain the /? help screen, too. Write a somewhat longer version of it, call it %freedos%\help\%program% or %freedos%\doc\%program%\readme.txt and include it with your program. Only the NEXT step will be asking some documentation-writers to take that text and make it more verbose and less technical and add some examples if that seems appropriate. For simple tools like TYPE or MORE (what was the meaning of /T4, by the way?) a short help file by the programmer will be enough. So we need some help (by people who prefer human language writing over C/ASM coding) to improve the quality of the documentation for the harder-to-use cases among the FreeDOS tools. We also need some help in making the HTMLized help pages match the actual syntax and usage of the FreeDOS tools. Quite a few pages describe older versions or even MS versions (our original plan was to be MS syntax compatible, but in reality some options are not supported and others got added and are supported only by the FreeDOS versions...) in HTMLHELP right now. I wrote some errata list (included in current database, but often I only tell that there is a syntax mismatch for tool X, without describing the details). Johnson started to fix some help pages, usually by reading program /? output and program.txt files and then fixing the html file with that information. But we should definitely have more help with that. The Wiki which Rob suggests seems to be a good idea for that. Every user and developer can easily submit corrections without having to learn CVS. Eric ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: YOU BE THE JUDGE. Be one of 170 Project Admins to receive an Apple iPod Mini FREE for your judgement on who ports your project to Linux PPC the best. Sponsored by IBM. Deadline: Sept. 24. Go here: http://sf.net/ppc_contest.php _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
