unix help routines

[Richard Harter]

In article <> mwh_adev at jhunix.UUCP (JHU UNIX Development Group) writes:
>I am interested in help routines for the unix system.  The manual is
>ok but is very difficult if you don't know already what you are looking
>for.  What I am interested in is a menu driven help routine similar
>to VMS help.  Upon invocation, this routine would spit out a list of
>topics and would prompt the user for a topic then a subtopic, etc.
>Has anyone done anything like this?  Is anyone currently working
>on something like this?  Are there any more redundant questions I can
>ask?
>
	We wrote one like that for the latest release of the ADC
system.  Currently we ship it as part of the system.  As far as a
public release goes, I don't know yet what we are going to do.  In
principle we would like to market it (Software houses don't write
software for free, you know.)  However, there are problems.  The
real problem is that the help program is only a small part of a
help system -- the important thing are the help files.  So a help
program in its own right is not a viable product.  In any case here
are the general specs:

The system consists of a help program, a set of help files, and a
file containing a help tree.  The latter is an indented listing of
help topics and subtopics with each line containing a topic and
the name of the corresponding help files.

Operation is very similar to VMS help; you give a topic and it
posts the information about the topic and a list of subtopics.
You go down the tree by typing a subtopic name and up by entering
a carriage return.  Like VMS help it is case insensitive and you
can truncate topic keywords up to the level of ambiguity.  We have
added some bells and whistles, however.

(1) The system is a single rooted tree.  There are path naming
conventions similar to UNIX file directory tree names.

(2) There are general search rules so that if you enter a topic
name that is not one of the current subtopics it goes to that topic
instead, regardless of its position in the tree.

(3) You can can ask for and get a listing of all occurrences of a
topic keyword.

(4) You can directly jump to any point in the tree.

Its a fun program.  I would love to have a version of it with the
UNIX man files transcribed into the corresponding help files.
Of course there is this little problem with copyrights ...
In any case, yeah, we have one and I suppose there are a
jillion others out there -- you should see the help system
they have VM/CMS.  But what you really want is a decent help
program AND the help files for UNIX.  I suspect it doesn't
exist.  Pity.

		Richard Harter, SMDS Inc.