[GRLUG] Documentation

[Joseph Workman]

I never realized the Debian was doing so much of that work. I wonder if
there is a difference in the development and contribution of manpages
between system tools developers and developers making "user" applications.

On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 6:42 PM, John-Thomas Richards <jtr at jrichards.org>wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 06:11:30PM -0500, Joseph Workman wrote:
> > I still use man page and info... they haven't gone anywhere...
>
> Thanks to Debian.  Unfortunately the UNIX-y way seems to be on the
> decline.  Used to be a GUI app was just a front-end to various CLI apps
> that did one or two things really, really well.  Along with that
> philosophy was the manpage.  Simple, elegant, useful.  Now many projects
> don't provide manpages.  Debian developers write many and contribute
> them upstream.  For example, I'm currently running the following apps:
> Chromium, xchat, audacity, gftp, oowriter, evolution.  Of these, only
> Chromium, audacity, and gftp were provided with a manpage.  Debian
> provided the rest.  While the sample size is small, half the manpages
> are from Debian.
>
> > On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 5:47 PM, Bob Kline <bob.kline at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > I sort of miss the days of Unix man pages.  Pretty straightforward,
> > > and useful.
> > >
> > > Could someone put together a little word salad about current day
> > > Linux documentation?  e.g., I see something like openssl-doc.
> > > What's a standard way to access that?
> > >
> > > /usr/share/doc is the main repository?
> > >
> > > Remember, teach a man to fish and you don't need to hand him a fish
> > > all the time.  i.e., more documentation means fewer questions.....
> > >
> > >    -- Bob
> --
> john-thomas
> ------
> A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead.
> Leo Rosten, author (1908-1997)
>
> --
> This message has been scanned for viruses and
> dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
> believed to be clean.
>
> _______________________________________________
> grlug mailing list
> grlug at grlug.org
> http://shinobu.grlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grlug
>



-- 
Joseph Workman
C.616.734.1411

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://shinobu.grlug.org/pipermail/grlug/attachments/20110221/6c4c69ec/attachment-0001.html>