SvarDOS community forum

Creating a new thread for clarity. JOJO asked this in another (unrelated) thread:

> I have an other question : how to access the freedos help ? help refers me to a few words about svardos.

You can't, sorry. Unless of course you manually fetch the FD-HELP thing from ibiblio or wherever it is distributed. The SvarDOS help definitely needs some work. For now it contains only a few specific things that are strictly specific to SvarDOS. It would be nice to have it extended a little bit with more generic content. But I would also like to keep it as small and compact as possible. For instance I do not think that it is useful to have a "man page" for every single command. Commands should be self-explanatory throughout their /? help screens. Currently the FreeDOS help package is huge: 2 MiB. This is more than the entire SvarDOS system! Insane. I think that a minimum would be to have a new page in the help that gives the lists of commands, with a short (one line or two max) general description for each command. Then, more information is always available under the command's /? help screen. This would actually mimic the help system from MS-DOS 5: there, help.exe is a tiny 11K binary that only lists available commands: https://images92.fotosik.pl/681/9baa7944e68d737f.png The help system does not have any more details about the commands. Executing for example "help fdisk" makes help.exe simply run "FDISK /?". That being said, it might also be nice to have the FreeDOS help system available as a third-party pkgnet package (that is, non-CORE) for people that absolutely want the FreeDOS manual. Mateusz

This subject came back last month as a github issue so I'm leaving a follow-up link here for posterity: https://github.com/SvarDOS/bugz/issues/51