On 02/25/2013 05:12 PM, Assaf Gordon wrote:
Hi,
Bernhard Voelker wrote, On 02/25/2013 10:58 AM:
On 02/25/2013 03:53 PM, Ondrej Oprala wrote:
to reduce the amount of questions about date, sort and anything
multibyte-related, I think
it'd be a good idea to add a link to the coreutils FAQ to the man pages
(and/or --help output), maybe something like
"Report TOOL bugs to bug-coreut...@gnu.org but please make sure the
behaviour is not listed in FAQ: link"
What do you think?
I'd not be surprised if this had already been discussed before.
However, I like the idea, but it would be best if we had nice
translations for that FAQ page.
If changing the general "help" message (I assume from "emit_ancillary_info()"),
perhaps consider another change:
Add a line (preferably on top) that would point to "coreutils@gnu.org" in addition to
"bugs-coreut...@gnu.org",
saying something like:
"For common usage questions, see <FAQ>"
and then
"Send usage questions to coreutils@gnu.org"
and only then print the existing:
"Report sort bugs to bug-coreut...@gnu.org"
This will (hopefully?) prevent those cases where people send general questions and open a
new bug, forcing someone to respond with the boiler-plate answer "by sending an
email to this mailing list, you've opened a bug-report, and I'm closing it".
There's already a link saying:
"General help using GNU software: <http://www.gnu.org/gethelp/>"
But this page is not very helpful for a non-expert who just wants to get help
about a specific GNU coreutils program...
Just my two cents,
-gordon
Thank you all for your replies,
I think reducing the number of links in help output is a great idea;
at the very least we should put the coreutils help link(or FAQ link)
before the bug-coreutils
address, so it's the first thing the users see. There's no help (apart
from the general GNU
help) mentioned there now and I think users (even offline users) should
be made more
aware that some special cases may exist for the coreutils package.
Thanks,
Ondrej
