[20834] in Athena Bugs
Re: "help" is really not so clear...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Oliver Thomas)
Fri Sep 27 17:04:26 2002
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2002 17:00:31 -0400
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Cc: Oliver Thomas <othomas@mit.edu>, bugs@mit.edu
To: John Hawkinson <jhawk@mit.edu>
From: Oliver Thomas <othomas@MIT.EDU>
In-Reply-To: <200209272042.QAA08601@hodge-podge.mit.edu>
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Fine with me. As far as I'm concerned this does not need review beyond
source-reviewers or whoever normally approves patches to stuff in the
release. Although isn't help an attachandrun script? So the group who
needs to sign off on the patch may be even smaller. Definitely no
sign-off from owls needed, as far as I'm concerned.
Oliver
On Friday, September 27, 2002, at 04:42 PM, John Hawkinson wrote:
> 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
>
