[ET Trac] [Einstein Toolkit] #120: Improve built-in help system

[Einstein Toolkit]

#120: Improve built-in help system
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  Reporter:  hinder       |       Owner:  mthomas
      Type:  enhancement  |      Status:  new    
  Priority:  major        |   Milestone:         
 Component:  SimFactory   |     Version:         
Resolution:               |    Keywords:         
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Comment (by hinder):

 @Erik: The use of a hyphen to separate words in 'long-style' options is
 very standard nowadays (see e.g.
 http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Argument-Syntax.html),
 so it's definitely what people should be expecting, irrespective of Lisp
 and Scheme :)

 The underlying problem here is reported in #221.  SimFactory should not
 just ignore unrecognised arguments; the fact that it does means that if
 you mis-type an argument, you don't get a useful error message.  This is
 quite a serious user-interface problem, and now that SimFactory 2 is the
 default in the ET, I think this should have a higher priority.

 Regarding terminology, Erik very helpfully provided
 (http://damiana2.aei.mpg.de/~ianhin/simfactoryuserguide/processterminology.html)
 an explanation of all the terms such as cores, procs, threads, N this per
 that etc, and the different things they mean in different contexts.  It
 would be really helpful if this could all be sorted out and made
 consistent throughout SimFactory.  I doubt that anyone other than Erik
 truly understands the current system, so I don't think it will be too much
 of a problem to change the interface in trunk if we can make it fully
 consistent.

 @Roland: There are ini files in the SimFactory source repository which
 describe all the options, their defaults, and their help text, and the
 user guide is regenerated automatically when there is a commit.  There
 isn't a way to mark two options as synonyms in SimFactory's documentation
 system, as far as I know, so you could just put the information there
 twice and say "Deprecated: Synonym for XXX".

 I will add the pointer to the user guide to the SimFactory web page.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.einsteintoolkit.org/ticket/120#comment:8>
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