[GRLUG] Documentation

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Tue, 2011-02-22 at 12:41 -0500, Bob Kline wrote:
> Do I see some confusion here over
> man pages and manuals.  

Nope.

> I see man pages as being system 
> documentation. i.e., how to use
> Linux, not applications that run under
> it.

Which is incorrect.  Man pages document many things, only sections #1
and #9 relates specifically to LINUX [Kernel routines].

See the man page for man.

> We've had rip roaring discussions in
> the past about what is Linux and what
> is not.  

The kernel is LINUX, nothing else is LINUX.  Period.  There is nothing
to discuss about that topic.

> But short of such flowery 
> discourse is the common need to just
> see what all the options are.

It is not at all a matter of opinion.

> In the early days of Unix the philosophy
> was to have simple commands that did
> one thing well. 

It is common to position this as a philosophy;  I don't accept that
there was every much of a philosophy behind UNIX (which LINUX isn't,
LINUX is a work-alike).  UNIX is primarily a heaping pile of pragmatic
compromises - most of which work extremely well and many of which are
creaky.

> 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.

Most of what you describe above is a function of the shell; and not
unique to UNIX.

> Anyway, I find the current Linux documentation
> world in a bit of disarray. 

I'd agree.  Disarray is a sadly natural part of complex systems.

> One would line to
> find something that will get them by most of
> the time.  

Use yelp, it integrates in the man and info content.  A good desktop
indexing system is also useful and all the mainstream ones include
documentation content by default. 


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