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