Re: Emacs setup assistants

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
> Date: 20 May 2004 12:57:11 +0200
> 
> > A tool such as the one being discussed needs mostly small chinks of
> > plain text interspersed with hyperlinks, something for which
> > Customize (and indeed even Help functions) already have the
> > necessary infrastructure, or at least large parts of it.
> 
> Small? No.  An assistant has to _explain_ things, and the ways in
> which they are related.

In my experience, long explanations are never read.  People nowadays
seem to have no patience for that.  That's why tutorials for setting
up software are out and FAQs are in.

> Isolated customization strings don't do that.

I didn't say isolated strings.  Writing a 10-sentence explanation for
a specific aspect of something doesn't require something as elaborate
as Texinfo.

> You don't get a coherent explanation and layout of what to do in what
> order and what influences what.  You get a twisty little maze of
> crosslinks with pieces of information scattered around, and the
> coherent ideas of the design having no place to be sitting.

The, IMHO, challenge is to organize those pieces of information in a
way that in every specific case we only display the text that explains
what the user currently cares about.  For example, when I need to set
up a port for some service, I don't want to hear a lecture about
TCP/IP and ports in general, just clear and practical suggestions for
coming up with the port number for that specific service.

> That's not what an assistant is supposed to do: an assistant is
> concerned with setting up a package, not with customizing a single
> variable once you have found out that you might want to customize
> _that_ variable.

Again, the challenge IMHO is to break a complex issue into a sequence
of well-defined short help messages, and a framework that guides the
user thru that sequence.  No one will ever read a 10-page explanation
just to set up a package (well, perhaps except you and me).