man pages

[Steven W. Orr]

On Fri, 13 Dec 2002, Derek Martin wrote:

=>--[PinePGP]--------------------------------------------------[begin]--
=>On Fri, Dec 13, 2002 at 12:45:12PM -0500, Scott Prive wrote:
=>> The lack of decent man pages on Linux is the one thing I hate about
=>> the environment the most (I like Linux, I just hate the shoddy and
=>> neglected documentation process).
=>
=>I have to disagree...  Overall, I find the man pages available for
=>Linux systems to be excellent -- in many cases much better than the
=>commercial equivalents.  However, the sad fact is that certain
=>projects have decided that there are better ways to do documentation.
=>For example, both GNOME and KDE generally have no man pages... they
=>have their own documentation that's based on DocBook and/or HTML
=>and/or SGML and/or ...
=>
=>However, I don't believe you'll find man pages for those commands on
=>commercial Unix flavors which ship them, either...  Anyone have
=>official gnome for Sun or HP?  Does it have man pages?
=>
=>> Just after the "This is not a useful manpage", my next favorite is
=>> the "This COULD be a manpage but we chose not to make one: try 'info
=>> [subject]' instead."
=>
=>You have the GNU project to thank for that...  Their standard
=>documentation methodology is GNU texinfo, which in my opinion is ucky.
=>In part because their browser interface is unintuitive and yet another
=>program that I don't want to have to learn; in part because the
=>standard method of documentation on Unix systems is man pages, and
=>providing info seems to be an exuse not to provide man pages; and in
=>part because it seems that the authors of texinfo documentation most
=>often write lousy documentation.  I think the latter is caused in part
=>by a lack of a standard organization...  Man pages all have a standard
=>format that is well known, making it very easy to duplicate.
Ucky!? Ucky you say!? I wave my private parts in your general direction!
info pages are really cool. Can you imagine saying man gcc and having to 
wade through that mess without hypertaxt? You start with the .texinfo src 
and then you get a choice of either processing it into .info pages for 
hypertext access on line, or else you process it with texi2dvi to 
publication quality printing. And I dare say that the number of commands 
needed to learn how to run info is far less than what you have to learn to 
run man.

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