Re: Poll: personal convenience vs. global improvement of docs
the ultimate solution is a 'make muttconfig' interface. Supporting any of the
'convenience' or 'improvement' are evil.
On 01:30 Thu 25 May 2006, markus reichelt wrote:
> * Gary Johnson <garyjohn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > In short, the benefit of changing names is minimal.
> I agree.
I don't agree.
There are indeed benefits. Any new mutt users can easily locate the options
they want and configure the rc file faster. But my 'gut feeling' tells me
that this is very unfair for the experienced users and a waste of their time.
> The user still has to understand any given _variable by reading the
> documentation, sooner or later. There is just no way around that.
hmm, kind of. Why should an end user have to ALWAYS read documentation in
order to perform even the most common operations? or Why should they read the
manual in the way they should with a textbook? We don't need diachronic
reading of a long file and any reading should be kept minimal.
>And > after a long time there's finally a .muttrc-builder out there again.
Indeed. This took too long but better late than never.
My suggestion is that: instead of wasting time on this 'global improvement',
the best solution is to start a ncurses-based configuration interface
(closely resembles that of Linux kernel's 'make menuconfig').
This 'make muttconfig' can be launched with a sane default options but users
can go through every variable which is grouped together according to its
function. The help of that variable should be available with with some
keystrokes in the interface (see? what a nice way to read manuals) and the
user can save and reload the muttrc file within this interface.
Wow, that will be ninth heaven!
Here is the fact: I feel configuring and getting kernel running pretty easy
(I never read many pages of long 'kernel manual') with the help of kernel
configuration interface. So, why not use it for mutt?
mutt's good but it needs a better configuration tool.
phyrster