One of those monumental days ........

[Tim Writer]

"Walter Dnes" <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org> writes:

> On Mon, Nov 07, 2005 at 11:21:45PM -0500, William Park wrote
> > On Mon, Nov 07, 2005 at 10:00:13PM -0600, Sy Ali wrote:
> > > On 11/6/05, Fraser Campbell <fraser-eicrhRFjby5dCsDujFhwbypxlwaOVQ5f at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > > > It's nice to see people recognizing Linux as a legitimate OS, other
> > > > times you just wonder where they've been for 5 years, or 10 years
> > > > even.
> > > 
> > > Trying to understand the man pages..
> > 
> > True.  If manpages were coded in HTML format instead of nroff, that
> > alone would be a giant leap.
> 
>   For some commands, man pages would be a *MAJOR* improvement.
> 
> <RANT>
> 
>   I'm talking specifically about "info".  Remember the old text
> adventure games like Zork?  You'd press an arrow in a random direction,
> trying to get to your destination.  Instead, you'd end up in some random
> chamber on another level.  You could easily waste hours playing the game.
> "info" works exactly the same way... *BUT I DON'T WANNA WASTE MY TIME
> PLAYING GAMES AND NAVIGATING UP AND DOWN BETWEEN RANDOM LEVELS WHEN I'M
> MERELY TRYING TO FIND THE PROPER SYNTAX FOR A LINUX COMMAND*!!!
> 
>   - Give me a large manpage, and I'll use the "/" key to find what I'm
>     looking for.

Ever tried looking up something in the bash man page?  Say, a builtin like
"set". It'll take you a while to find the "set" you're looking for. In
contrast, the zsh man page has been broken into a number of separate pages
with "man zsh" providing a table of contents. I find this much easier to
navigate. It's funny that bash is the GNU shell yet it has an enormous man
page instead of an info guide.

It can be much easier to find what you're looking for in an info document
with a good index (or indices). And you can search the full text of an info
document with "s" using the text based or Emacs info viewers. The fact that
some info viewers lack a decent search function is a problem with the viewer,
not the format.

In general, it's not so much the format that's the problem but the quality
and coverage of the content. Unfortunately, most developers (myself included)
prefer writing code to documentation and there are relatively few volunteers
who write documentation.

-- 
tim writer <tim-s/rLXaiAEBtBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org>                                  starnix inc.
647.722.5301                                      toronto, ontario, canada
http://www.starnix.com              professional linux services & products
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