🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi -

I'd appreciate comment about a possible major mistake I'm about to make.

I run a VAX with mostly pretty inexperienced users, who primarily use
specialized software packages (though not exclusively).  I'm increasingly
uncomfortable with telling these people to use HELP, because the VMS library 
is now so huge that it confuses them.

Like many other sites, I've set up procedures which add my local help
stuff to the vanilla VMS library, and to take them away again if I need to
do that.  But this just makes the library even larger.  I've thought about
setting up user libraries, but this puts the stuff my users want to get
at most under one of those ugly "@" signs, whereas they still get all the
vanilla stuff by default.

What I'm thinking of doing is turning the default around, i.e., putting
the local stuff in as the root library, and letting the VMS stuff be
accessible with "@".  I would of course define HLP$LIBRARY, so that if
someone said "HELP COPY", they'd still get an answer.  But if they said
"HELP", they'd get a much smaller list of stuff that makes sense to them.
Since everything would be accomplished by logical name definition, it 
would seem an easy solution to maintain though VMS updates, etc.

But somehow, it feels like a bad idea.

Has anyone else done this?  Why is it a bad idea?  What system management
issues have I overlooked?  How do the rest of you handle this problem?

Thanks,

Greg Hamm
Rutgers Molecular Biology Computing Lab

hamm@biovax.bitnet
hamm@biovax.rutgers.edu


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