HELP task ambiguities

Mike Fitzpatrick wrote on Mar 30, 1998

> In this case, "help" accesses the wrong file.  I have been trying to get
> "ellipse" to work, and wanted to see just what its "controlpar" pset
> does.  I did "help controlpar", and what I got was
> 
> 	CONTROLPARS (Feb96)      stsdas.analysis.fitting 
> 
> I was able to get the right help file by doing "help isophote.controlpar".
> Apparently the trouble was caused by the fact that I had accessed
> "analysis" more recently than "isophote", even though the task I had been
> using was "ellipse".  I don't know if anything can be done about this
> quirk, but it can be very puzzling.

	The ambiguity comes about because the help task searches for the
template first in all modules in the current package, and then in all
modules in all packages except the current one.  The 'curpack' parameter
defaults to "AskCL" which follows the above scheme, but you can also set
it explicitly as in

	cl> help controlpar curpack=isophote

but this is clumsier than "help isophote.controlpar" and just as obscure.
A better solution would be to enable the 'all' parameter to HELP, i.e.

	cl> help controlpar all+

With the ANALYSIS package loaded you would still see the FITTING pkg help
page first but just keep scrolling and you'll see the one you want right
afterwards.  'All' defaults to no so you usually only see the first match
which may not always be correct, turn it on and you'll see every match and
perhaps even stumble onto something helpful you weren't expecting.

Cheers,
-Mike

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Last post on Mar 30, 1998