[Coco] Making OS-9/NitrOS9 more user friendly Facebook group discussion

[William Carlin]

I am surprised there are no comments on the other subjects I touched on
except by Allen Huffman briefly agreeing that the command line options are
inconsistent and that there should be more concise documentation.

I was at one time thinking about a very light weight "html help" parser
that could pull the documentation from the NitrOS9 Commands Reference Wiki
on SourceForge, using DriveWire, so the documentation could be all in one
place and any changes would be seamless to the user.  The entire page could
be pulled down and parsed into individuals files and compiled into the
traditional /dd/sys/helpmsg format, converted into the mroff style for man,
or kept as is and stored in /dd/sys.  The "html help" parser could use that
as a backup source on "real" systems that lack DriveWire capability or are
not "online" for whatever reason.  I am trying to come up with solutions
that could easily be done both on system (using Microware C) and added to
the make files (like a perl or python script) on the NitrOS9 repository for
automated processing and inclusion in the nightly builds.

https://sourceforge.net/p/nitros9/wiki/NitrOS-9_Commands_Reference/

William H. Carlin, Jr.
whcarlinjr at gmail.com

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 9:40 AM, William Carlin <whcarlinjr at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I know of two.  One is KwikGen by Sardis Technologies and Licensed by Gale
> Force Enterprises.  The other is EZGen by unknown author.  The -? help
> message shows no company or programmer identification and my DOCS directory
> has no documentation that I would normally put in that location.  Both are
> of course command line boot file editors.
>
> William H. Carlin, Jr.
> whcarlinjr at gmail.com
>
>
> On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 7:48 AM, Francis Swygert <farna at att.net> wrote:
>
>> Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2017 22:34:39 -0500
>> From: Gene Heskett <gheskett at shentel.net>
>>
>> Suggestion: What we need for boot creation is an editor that can look at
>> a descriptor, obtain the driver that goes with it, and makes sure its in
>> the bootlist. Or if we remove a descriptor, checks to see if its the
>> last user of a driver and deletes in from the bootlist if it was. With
>> context aware help, that would go a long way towards improving the user
>> friendliness.
>>
>> Cheers, Gene Heskett
>> ==============================================
>> I seem to recall that Rick Ulland wrote a boot generator and sold it
>> through his company, CoNect!, and FARNA Systems. Can't remember the name
>> and don't have a copy, but if someone finds it/has one they can put it up
>> on one of the archive sites.
>>  Frank Swygert
>>  Fix-It-Frank Handyman Service
>>  803-604-6548
>>
>> --
>> Coco mailing list
>> Coco at maltedmedia.com
>> https://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
>>
>
>