[20832] in Athena Bugs
"help" is really not so clear...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Fri Sep 27 16:43:03 2002
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2002 16:42:58 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <200209272042.QAA08601@hodge-podge.mit.edu>
To: bugs@MIT.EDU, Oliver Thomas <othomas@MIT.EDU>
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
Recently, I had cause to look at /usr/athena/bin/help. I was kind of
disturbed to discover that when you type "help", you get not feedback,
just the athena prompt, and then a few sec/min/hours later, you get a
web browser.
This doesn't seem so good.
Looking at the help script, it actually does print feedback, but
only if you're not starting a graphical web browser. This seems
rather backwards, since if you're starting an ascii browser,
presumably it will be so intantaneous you won't see the message.
Anyhow, attached is a patch to cause "help" to speak verbosely when
it's starting a graphical browser, and also to adjust the message for
other cases slightly, to be more in line with common usage, rather
than 1997-usage. I chose to not simply remove the test, since I don't
think we want to say "Starting the htmlview web browser" for the
common case.
I'm not totally sure where to send this. /mit/help/README suggests
emailing owls, but that feels totally wrong.
I observe that the RCS history for "help" lives in dot's homedir,
which seems rather odd, especially given her lack of connection to
I/S these days.
Oliver, are you ok with applying the patch and moving the RCS
history, or should I followup elsewhere with another party?
--jhawk
--- /mit/help/arch/share/bin/olh Tue Jan 7 09:19:28 1997
+++ /tmp/help Fri Sep 27 16:33:58 2002
@@ -35,7 +35,8 @@
msg_keyword2=" not found. Bringing up OLH Keyword list."
msg_fail1="The "; msg_fail2=" browser failed."
msg_fail_motif="Try running 'help -tty' instead."
-msg_start1="Starting "; msg_start2=" World-Wide Web browser..."
+msg_start1="Starting the "; msg_start2=" web browser..."
+msg_start3="Starting a web browser..."
#### End Configuration - No changes needed below this line.
@@ -110,6 +111,8 @@
# Run program
if [ "$browser" != "$browser_graphic" ] ; then
echo ${msg_start1}${browser}${msg_start2}
+else
+ echo ${msg_start3}
fi
if [ "$starting_url" = "" ] ; then
starting_url=$olh_url
