Bug#368328: which options are the most important?

[Frederik Eaton]

Package: exim4
Version: 4.50-8
Severity: normal

The exim4 man page doesn't say which command-line options are the most
important.

The options are listed in alphabetical order, so I don't know in which
order to read them to start learning about exim. This is especially
frustrating since there are so many options and they all seem to refer
to each other.

Furthermore, if I want to find documentation on a particular option, I
will use the text search functionality of my pager to search for it,
and I think most other users will do the same. Therefore the most
common reason for listing items in alphabetical order, namely so that
readers of paper literature can use a binary search to find a
particular item, doesn't apply here.

Whereas if the options would be described in order of importance, then
that would provide a natural progression in which people could learn
about the command.

And even if it were necessary to print the manual page on paper at
some point, I think it would still be better to have a pedagogical
ordering of the options, and to just include an alphabetized index at
the end of the document.

So that leaves me wondering why it was decided to list the command
line options in alphabetical order in the manual page.

-- Package-specific info:
Exim version 4.50 #1 built 27-May-2005 08:08:19
Copyright (c) University of Cambridge 2004
Berkeley DB: Sleepycat Software: Berkeley DB 4.2.52: (December  3, 2003)
Support for: iconv() IPv6 GnuTLS
Lookups: lsearch wildlsearch nwildlsearch iplsearch cdb dbm dbmnz dsearch nis nis0 passwd
Authenticators: cram_md5 plaintext
Routers: accept dnslookup ipliteral manualroute queryprogram redirect
Transports: appendfile/maildir/mailstore autoreply lmtp pipe smtp
Fixed never_users: 0
Configuration file is /var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.14-1-k7
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)

Versions of packages exim4 depends on:
ii  exim4-base                    4.50-8     support files for all exim MTA (v4
ii  exim4-daemon-light            4.50-8     lightweight exim MTA (v4) daemon

exim4 recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information