[GRLUG] Documentation

[Bob Kline]

Do I see some confusion here over
man pages and manuals.  Closer to
what John-Thomas is suggesting, I
see man pages as being system
documentation. i.e., how to use
Linux, not applications that run under
it.

We've had rip roaring discussions in
the past about what is Linux and what
is not.  But short of such flowery
discourse is the common need to just
see what all the options are.

In the early days of Unix the philosophy
was to have simple commands that did
one thing well.  I think it was even put
something like that.  Commands were
piped so the user could build up the
exactly function needed at the time,
and one uses aliases to save often
used sequences.

Of course all this was in the days fo
truly dumb terminals, and there wasn't
an ability, to, say, set a color scheme
in you "ls" command.

But today even "ls," "cat" and some
other old favorites might have 25 or
30 options, some of which might even
be occasionally useful.  No mortal can
remember them all - well a few mortals
with eidetic memories - maybe 10
people in the US.  So, once again,
correct, quickly accessible man pages.

Yes, those old commands mostly do the
old things too.  But.

Anyway, I find the current Linux documentation
world in a bit of disarray.  One would line to
find something that will get them by most of
the time.  It's a question of efficiency.  I still
think the original Unix inventors had it right.

And no, this group is not part of the man
page system - a good way to get information,
but not what was intended....  ;-)

    -- Bob


On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 7:57 AM, John-Thomas Richards <jtr at jrichards.org>wrote:

> 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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