Making documentation easier to find (was: Re: exim mail routing...)
>what i mean, is, the reason newbies don't FIND the documentation
>is because it is an ORDEAL to do so. apprentice-guru status is
>required to know to search /usr/doc via zgrep AND /usr/share/doc
>AND info pages AND man pages AND apropos...
You're quite right.
Could this be a solution? A new Debian utility called documentationview or
something, tree-organized like dselect. The first thing you do is to select
a category. And then you get maybe an HOWTO and a FAQ from there, and a
list of available programs/packages. If you select a package, available
help files from within that package is shown. Manuals, getting started
stuff, etc. And maybe links to configuration scripts? If you select one of
them, it could start up man, info, less, mozilla/lynx, or whatever is
appropriate.
I haven't read the .deb specs, since I'm not much more than a newbie yet,
but maybe there could be a possibility to include this therein. As I see,
there are at least two problems with this:
1) Somebody has to write the program
2) All the debian package maintainers have to use it.
One of the things that took the most time until I got my mail working under
linux was to find out that my mail program were named "exim", "mutt" and
"fetchmail". I mean - the mail HOWTO doesn't say anything at all about
exim...so how was I supposed to find out?
(Maybe there is something like this in debian already. How would I know?)
/ David
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