Making YottaDB online help more useful

[K.S. Bhaskar]

YottaDB has online user manuals as well as online help. ZHELP for YottaDB, and HELP commands in each of the utility programs brings up online help with an interface that is modeled on VMS online help. We are not sure how useful the current online help is, and would like to solicit your input at Improve online help or as a reply to this message.

We would welcome any and all comments. Please consider the following questions to stimulate your thinking, and either answer them, or give us your inputs in any form that works for you.

• Do you find the online help useful?
• Would you find a `man` page useful?
• How would you use a man page? As a quick reference for commands, or for detailed information?
• Do you want detailed information installed on your system, or would you just use a web browser to access the online manuals?
• How would a text browser like lynx work for you if `ydbinstall` had an option to install the documentation locally?

Thank you very much for helping us to make YottaDB more useful to you.

Regards
– Bhaskar

--
YottaDB - The fastest key-value database engine in the world?
Find out for yourself.

[Kevin Toppenberg]

I have never used zhelp before.  I just checked it out.

As it stands, I prefer to bring up a browser and use the programmer's guide.  I feel I can view more information and navigate better there. 

A man page from the linux command prompt would have to have sub pages.  Too much info to put on one page.  I don't think I would use that.  Having man pages inside yottadb might be more helpful.  The current zhelp is similar to that, though I would have recommendations for improving it. 

Overall, I prefer using a web browser.  I don't think I would want a lynx style text based page.

Kevin

[Mark Sires]

First off, let me say the YottaDB documentation is excellent!  Kudos to the entire team!

I was unaware of ZHELP, but I'll check it out.  The online documentation is where I go to find answers.  A man page might be useful, but not worth a lot of effort in my opinion.

Local installation of the browser based help would be a good option, but I have never had an issue accessing the online documentation, so not a high priority for me.

Lynx?  Not really - I put a man page higher on the want list than that.

The only improvement I could suggest to the documentation is to include more examples that show more of the options for various command, particularly the IO sections and the mupip options.

Mark

On Wednesday, December 18, 2024 at 5:37:26 PM UTC-5 K.S. Bhaskar wrote:

[K.S. Bhaskar]

Thanks for the comments, Kevin & Mark. For what it's worth, the documentation already works with lynx & links, and you can use rsync to make a local copy of docs.yottadb.com.

Regards

– Bhaskar