[GRLUG] Documentation

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Mon, 2011-02-21 at 18:42 -0500, John-Thomas Richards 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.

I don't think this is true.  Modern DEs [Desktop Environments] provide
very robust documentation schemes that are significantly superior to the
"man page" system.  If you use GNOME just run "yelp"; through which you
can also access the content of the legacy man & info schemes.

>   Used to be a GUI app was just a front-end to various CLI apps
> that did one or two things really, really well.

Or rather poorly, whichever.

>   Along with that
> philosophy was the manpage.  Simple, elegant, useful. 

Impossible to navigate and with lousy search capabilities.  The "bash"
man page is monstrous and I've heard many comments about it over the
years; "useful" was rarely, if ever, a component of those comments.

> Now many projects don't provide manpages.

There is no point to providing man-pages to end-user applications.
Those applications have help systems or utilize the DE's help system [in
GNOME: yelp]



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