Ideas on HELP for UNIX

[david at uhccux.UUCP]

We're running a general purpose UNIX (actually ULTRIX) system for the first
time here, and are trying to think about how to ease the transition from
(dare I say it here) "friendlier" systems like TOPS-20 so that our users
can come to appreciate the power and flexibility UNIX offers.

One of the things that seems to be a serious need is a help system of some
sort.  I've been thinking about what "help" should do on this system (I'm 
sure I'm not the first), and here are some thoughts.

	It shouldn't duplicate 'man'.
	It should be oriented for the beginning user who can't understand or 
deal with very long man pages to extract simple info.  Ideally, it would 
obsolete itself by continually guiding users to other sources (man, apropos, 
hardcopy).
	It should be concept / idea oriented rather than program-name oriented.
	It should be easy to maintain.
	It should contain highly localized info which is not appropriate for manpages (e.g. because of copyright or maintenance nuisance problems).

To me, the VMS tree structured help isn't the answer.  If the user knew what 
s/he wanted and could use help well, s/he could probably manage with man pages. 
We also don't really have a trained VMS audience to worry about either.

I'm curious about how other sites handle this problem, if at all.  I whipped up
a quick script which does the following:

# With no arguments, this script echoes a general help file.
# Otherwise it accepts one argument and provides the following:
#	1) a listing of the local help file for the argument, if present
#	2) whether there is a man page, and if so how long it is
#	3) a list of other relevant man pages from section 1 (using apropos)

Does it seem reasonable to you?  Have you done anything like it?  Any 
suggestions for improvement?  Think I'm wasting my time?  I'm new to UNIX too, 
so any advice and opinions will be gratefully accepted.
-- 
David Lassner, University of Hawaii Computing Center, 808/948-7351
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