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List:       majordomo-workers
Subject:    Majordomo 2 help system update
From:       SRE <eckert () climber ! org>
Date:       1999-01-29 20:09:17
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Want to help? If you know about the internals of Mj2, you can help
figure out how to convert my private-use Perl script into something
that runs as part of the installation. If you love HTML, you can
help turn the help files into a website. If you are using Mj2, you
can review the files and point out any errors or ambiguities.

Some of you have heard about the help files before, but just in case
you're only on the mj2-docs list, here's an overview:

----------------------

I've been working on Mj2 help files, with a lot of help from Jason
and some great reviewer comments from John and others. Just this
week several improvements have been released:
  - escaping of '$' and '\' in help files
  - default help file renamed
  - help error file instead of builtin message
  - major improvements in many help messages
  - bug fixes in a couple of commands

Right now I've implemented help by storing files under GLOBAL with "put"
instead of building them into the main release. It's faster to change,
and I don't have to re-install all the time. I have a Perl script that
extracts the comments from configshow (for both a regular list and the
GLOBAL pseudo-list) and turns them into help files. For those commands
that are not adequately explained by configshow, I am creating side
files that get automatically appended to the extracted output when the
help files are stored. For commands other than configset, I have taken
whatever documentation I could find and created a separate help file
for each and every command I know about. Some of these commands were
completely undocumented in the past, and Jason has been very generous
with his time in helping me figure them out.

Eventually the help files will be generated both in Mj2 help format and
in HTML. There are some top-level help files that do not relate 1-to-1
with Mj2 commands, but instead of grouping commands together I've tried
to make it easy to figure out which help file you need (from the two
overview files) so you can go directly to the right help file. There is
very little duplicated information so things don't get out of synch, but
it's possible that what you are looking for will be somewhere else... by
all means let me know if you can't find what you need quickly, and I'll
put in a pointer to the right file.

Commands like access_rules, admin_body, and attachment_rules have
recently been documented. If you're setting up a Mj2 list, or if you
already have one running, you may want to review these files and/or
let us know if things don't work the way they're written down.

A recent change in the code was to rename the file sent out when the
user just asks for "help" instead of "help TOPIC", and the addition
of a file that gets sent out when the user asks for help on a topic
that doesn't exist. The non-existant help message (before) was just
an error about a bad command, and now the user gets a note explaining
how to use help and a list of all available help topics.

Want to try it out? Send email to lists@climber.org with this message:
  help
which will point you at the overview files. For a fast list of all
topics, try sending something nonsensical like
  help gak
to get the "help unknowntopic" error file that lists all topics.

SRE

mailto:eckert@climber.org | http://www.climber.org/eckert/
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