[GRLUG] Documentation

[John-Thomas Richards]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 05:51:59AM -0500, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> 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.

And if the app in question is not part of a DE?  Quick, how do I start
OO.o Impress with a presentation loaded and running?  `man ooimpress' is
much quicker to find this.

> >   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.

Good point.

> >   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.

manpages aren't about how to use an app.  Largely they focus on
commandline switches and syntax.

> > 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]

And yet one of the largest (the largest?) distros provide numerous
manpages when the upstream developers won't.
-- 
john-thomas
------
Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing
exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the
well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.
Herman Melville, novelist and poet (1819-1891)

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