Re: manpage for GNU utilities?
On Feb 21, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Hi,
> >>"Chris" == Chris Lawrence <quango@ix.netcom.com> writes:
>
> Chris> On Feb 21, Christian Schwarz wrote:
> >> IMO, this is a policy violation. Especially, in the case of
> >> sort(1), where the info page is much more up-to-date than the
> >> manpage.
>
> Chris> I'm with you on this... a man page is a lot more useful for
> Chris> general usage than an Info page (I use man all of the time,
> Chris> while I only reluctantly pull up Info).
>
> This is an opinion. I tend to disagree.
Well, Christian *asked* for opinions. I provided one.
> Chris> IMHO, people should be shipping complete man pages; as a
> Chris> compromise, I'd be willing to read HTML pages (where you have a
> Chris> decent choice of viewers) instead of Info pages (lynx is a lot
> Chris> lighter-weight than emacs for reference purposes).
>
> Who needs to pull up emacs to read info pages? there is a
> stand alone info, which is faster than lynx, and has way
> better search capabilities than either lynx or "less".
Last I checked, it also had incomprehensible key-bindings (which permanently
discouraged me from using it) and took up space on my hard drive that could
be better used. I have used info (so I do have knowledge of the tools
available), and found it a rather worthless tool for reading documentation
for those reasons; your mileage may vary.
> I understand people who say outdated man pages are bad, but
> lack of knowledge of the tools available is no justification in a
> policy debate.
Ok, so I have to install yet another application capable of reading info
files just to get relevant information on a command? Info is only useful
for one thing: reading info files. If the information was provided as a man
page or a HTML file, info wouldn't be necessary on my system.
In any event, anyone can use "man". Relevant and accurate information about
the tools should be provided on man pages. Info, HTML, etc. should be for
more detailed reference (a tutorial should be provided as Info or HTML, for
example). Besides, shipping man pages that don't even have up-to-date
information on them is pretty silly, particularly ones that say "Read the
info file to actually use this program" while blathering on for pages and
pages about the options you could have supplied to some version of the
program that's eight years old, and particularly for programs that are
"standard Unix commands," whatever that means... No commercial Unix vendor
would say "Read our custom, narrowly-supported documentation format since we
can't be bothered to write a proper man page," and whatever the FSF's rather
misguided inclincations, nor should we.
Chris
--
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| Chris Lawrence | You have a computer. Do you have Linux? |
| <quango@ix.netcom.com> | http://www.linux-m68k.org/index.html |
| | |
| Sr Political Science Major | Are you tired of politics as usual? |
| University of Memphis | http://www.lp.org/ |
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