Re: [boost] Attention Boosters

From: Rene Rivera (grafikrobot_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-12-13 19:11:49

David Abrahams wrote:
> Alexander Nasonov <alnsn_at_[hidden]> writes:
> 
>> ./configure --help should be probably explained at the same level of
>> details as 'don't type $' or 'hold down the control key and press "Z"'.
>> It prints more then one standard text screen and you would either teach
>> users to Shift-PageUp, Shift-PageDown (Scroll followed by
>> PageUp/PageDown and then Scroll again on FreeBSD) or use
>> ./configure --help | more.
> 
> Hmm, it's hard to do that in a way that will work everywhere.  Rene,
> what about building some kind of "more" functionality into the
> Boost.Build help system?

Ah, seems like a very bad idea to me. I think writing code that is so 
platform dependent and is commonly known to be available as the separate 
utility "more" will create more problems than it would solve.

A better idea is to add that functionality to the configure script 
itself. Just have it figure out a paging program to use to send such 
output to.

Personally I wouldn't add such a thing at all. I would think you would 
be hard pressed to find Unix users who don't know how to use "more", or 
use a terminal/shell window with a scroll bar.

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