Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watnot!watmath!clyde!rutgers!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!BIOVAX.RUTGERS.EDU!hamm From: hamm@BIOVAX.RUTGERS.EDU.UUCP Newsgroups: mod.computers.vax Subject: Are custom HELP libraries a good idea? Message-ID: <8703271513.AA07460@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> Date: Thu, 26-Mar-87 14:08:00 EST Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8703271513.AA07460 Posted: Thu Mar 26 14:08:00 1987 Date-Received: Sat, 28-Mar-87 13:47:20 EST Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: Distribution: world Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 41 Approved: info-vax@sri-kl.arpa Hi - I'd appreciate comment about a possible major mistake I'm about to make. I run a VAX with mostly pretty inexperienced users, who primarily use specialized software packages (though not exclusively). I'm increasingly uncomfortable with telling these people to use HELP, because the VMS library is now so huge that it confuses them. Like many other sites, I've set up procedures which add my local help stuff to the vanilla VMS library, and to take them away again if I need to do that. But this just makes the library even larger. I've thought about setting up user libraries, but this puts the stuff my users want to get at most under one of those ugly "@" signs, whereas they still get all the vanilla stuff by default. What I'm thinking of doing is turning the default around, i.e., putting the local stuff in as the root library, and letting the VMS stuff be accessible with "@". I would of course define HLP$LIBRARY, so that if someone said "HELP COPY", they'd still get an answer. But if they said "HELP", they'd get a much smaller list of stuff that makes sense to them. Since everything would be accomplished by logical name definition, it would seem an easy solution to maintain though VMS updates, etc. But somehow, it feels like a bad idea. Has anyone else done this? Why is it a bad idea? What system management issues have I overlooked? How do the rest of you handle this problem? Thanks, Greg Hamm Rutgers Molecular Biology Computing Lab hamm@biovax.bitnet hamm@biovax.rutgers.edu ------ ------