[Mailman-Developers] Offer of help

[Terri Oda]

On Nov 12, 2004, at 1:39 AM, Russ Pagenkopf wrote:

> Not quite sure where to post this, so I thought I'd send it here. I've 
> just started working with Mailman and when I started to print out the 
> administrator commands with --help I noticed, ummm, a bit of, well, 
> shall we say, inconsistency. :) Now I'm not a python programmer (sigh, 
> another to learn?), but in looking through the files it looks like it 
> would be fairly simple to edit them to a consistent standard.


> I want to contribute back and this is something I can do. Who and how 
> should I submit these changes? I think a lot of the text descriptions 
> could also be cleaned up and used on the web page, so I'd be happy to 
> do that as well.

Okey dokey.  Sorry I didn't get right back to you.

So I would *love* it if you did revisions on the --help for the 
commands.   I don't know if you were planning on changing any code or 
just the --help output, but do be super-careful about changing any of 
the actual functionality -- basically, we'd prefer not to change the 
way anything works so upgrades don't break people's automated scripts, 
but if you add additional syntaxes for the same thing, that's okay.

I've been working on man pages, and the lack of consistency was getting 
on my nerves, but I hadn't had time to go through and do anything about 
it.  If you've got more time once you've got the --help documentation 
made consistent, I'd really love it if you could update/create man 
pages for the commands in bin/.   I'm pretty sure you'll need to alter 
some of the ones I have to be more consistent when you alter the 
commands.  If you check out CVS, the man pages are all in doc/man, and 
it should be fairly obvious how they're formatted.  I'm not a big 
expert on writing man pages, so if you get into it and find a better 
way to format them, don't feel you have to stick with my work.

My eventual plan for the man pages is to convert these to HTML for the 
website as well as bundling them with a future release of 2.1.  That 
way, I only have to update the man pages and regenerate the HTML rather 
than handling them separately.  (Although if you want to start writing 
the site admin manual, which would include descriptions of these 
commands...)

If this is too much work, do feel free to do whatever you're able to do 
and I'll try to make things match. :)

And thank you *so* much for offering.  You're right and it really 
should be done, and I think it's one of those little things that can 
make those scripts more pleasant to use.

  Terri