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

there are several aspects about help: Many new users that only learned tapping on a screen have no idea about basic handling dos, e.g. how to create folder structure, how to navigate thru, which files can be executed and which not, what do I need sys files for, what are batch files used for etc. without this a newbie cannot start. I tried to do this with newbies01 and 02 at fd help. but I am realistic enough that this can be made shorter than in fd help. explanation of /? and -h should also be a part of it. A short introduction is a must in my eyes. your short explanation in one or two lines is not bad in my eyes. it is also possible to lead help command to command /? or -h. but your help should know if /? or -h or --help is required and give a short comment if there is no help. Otherwise your users are confused. but the most important thing are examples so that people understand the syntax. I often needed a long time on special commands to understand the syntax. you can write the command /? as often as you want, but many people only understand things when they see a usable example. and you know that 5 hours of testing can easily replace reading a manual within 5 minutes. all this makes the help bigger, but if you work with zip etc. it could nevertheless stay small. hyperlinks to other commands need a lot of space and are helpful, butnot absolutely necessary. I am aware that an explanation of basic things and examples for commands make the help bigger, but alltogether they are smaller than fd help. if you can combine /? with the examples and | more you would have everything inside.

Hello Fritz, thanks for stopping by on this forum :-) To sum up, you are saying that: 1. Newbies need some basic introduction to DOS 2. Some commands would benefit from having a few examples I looked at your home page on mnet-online, but could not find the "newbies01 / newbies02" content that you mentioned. Could you please share a link? While I do not believe that adding a full-blown DOS manual to SvarDOS would be productive, I think that some kind of hands-on introduction that fits on a screen or two could be very nice (maybe with a link to some more detailed online resources about DOS). I am curious to see what you came up with. About the examples: you are certainly right that an example can save a lot of time sometimes. Do you have any specific command in mind, any suggestions? Mateusz

https://home.mnet-online.de/willybilly/HTMLhelp-110/en/index.htm It is only in version 1.1.0. This help is too big for svardos, I know. In about 360 commands are not really necessary. Almost all have examples, except the utils section as it leads too far. I tried to add usable examples, even these may sometimes be to long for you, but if you remove the text from the single fd help files all this is much smaller. PS: hope you got my final Excel sheet with fd and svardos hyperlinks Fritz

Thanks for the link! The "newbie" part is a very nice general introduction to DOS. It appears to be about 5K once zipped, so very reasonable. Would there be any chance that you could merge the two parts together, and maybe edit it out to be a little more compact so it is easier and faster to translate? And if you'd be willing to insert it into the SvarDOS help that would be really awesome. :) (I can provide you step by step instructions for this of course) As for the examples, I was rather thinking about adding two or three examples to the /? screens of the few commands that might need it the most. Albeit honestly I'm not even sure which commands that would be. That being said, the work you have put into fdhelp is truly impressive, it became a full-blown DOS manual. I just do not think it is suited for redistribution within SvarDOS core due to space constraints ("single-floppy OS"). It is probably best to leave the fdhelp package as a third-party add-on, this way whoever needs extensive DOS information can fetch it. Perhaps it would be worth to mention that in the newbies section (something like "if you need a more detailed DOS manual, get the package FDHELP"). Yes, I did receive your nice XLS sheet, thank you for that. Unfortunately I won't have the time capacity to update all these packages myself, so I reported it in our bugz tracker in the hope that maybe someone would like to pick it up: https://github.com/SvarDOS/bugz/issues/84 cheers Mateusz

>Thanks for the link! The "newbie" part is a very nice general introduction to DOS. It appears to be about 5K once zipped, so very reasonable. >Would there be any chance that you could merge the two parts together, and maybe edit it out to be a little more compact so it is easier and >faster to translate? And if you'd be willing to insert it into the SvarDOS help that would be really awesome. :) (I can provide you step by step >instructions for this of course)

The newbie was splitted into two parts to show the people that they can stop now as otherwise it will be too much information. But of course it can be on one sheet with two lessons. The coffee etc. was added to relax the readers. It can be removed but then it is too technical for many users. So I tried to make a mixture between explanation and not shocking the new users. Give me a while and I will try to shorten it. Newbies could be a standalone text and not part of your help. Adding only some examples is a problem as you never know which problems different people have. One of the most complicated commands for me was chcp, I had to ask Aitor how it is correct, and I added a short and a long explanation inside to make it understandable for other users. So I think the best is to add all examples or no examples at all.

Chiming in (as a kind-of new user :). This is surely ambitious, but in the (really) long run, couldn't something akin to the NetBSD Guide/FreeBSD Handbook be an ambition for SvarDOS? I have used the NetBSD guide, and for me, its strength lies in the coherence - it really is a "full book" that you can read from start to finish. Obviously, for SvarDOS, the scope would be multiple times smaller, so it shouldn't be a 900-page document. :) But a contemporary "book" describing a really compact 2020s-era DOS system in a coherent way would be hugely beneficial to many, I think. Wikis etc are great, but they can become scattered and messy over time. Books, being a "whole", can offer clarity that wikis sometimes lack. (That said, e.g. the Arch Linux wiki is really good - so might be that this is all just a matter of a careful, well thought out editing policy, and good writing skills.) Granted, a SvarDOS Guidebook woud take a lot of time - not expecting Mateusz to not have other, possibly more relevant things to do at this point :). I myself am unfortunately also of no help, since my set of skills is more towards end-user level. Nonetheless, I figured I'd just bring up this idea or a possible direction regarding SvarDOS documentation. Other than that, +1 for the mentioned single-line explanations! This would be great, instantly useful (e.g. for people who are used to Unix commands and get confused in DOS at first), and probably not at all time-consuming to implement.