Re: water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.
"Kevin Stokes" <linux@pieskysoft.com> wrote:
>>GNU/Linux is a grown-up's operating system. You're expected to know
>your way around, or be able to figure it out.<
>
> I'm sorry, but the 'You're dumb or lazy or both' argument will not fly.
>There is an easily-correctable problem with Linux, and I hope the good
>people who devote so much time to Linux will see that.
We're doing our damnedest, and I know I'll accept pretty much any
documentation improvements I'm sent. It really grates to be told how the
documentation we've spent time writing is worthless without any help
being given to improve it, but if help is given then that's always
welcome. Given all the effort put in by a lot of people, I don't think
it's too presumptuous of me to say that it's not quite as easily
correctible as you think.
For what it's worth, I think the existing man page framework is fine for
this (but then I would say that). Sure, some man pages are useless, and
a lot of them are specific to individual programs. A lot of them are
general introductions to things as well. There's also info and the
HOWTOs. If you want to put some effort into improving Linux's help
system, your time would be a lot better spent working on writing code
thet indexes all of these in a friendly way (there are already GUI
frontends to man, and I'm sure the existing whatis/apropos indices could
be levered into a nice graphical index) than coming up with yet another
competing format that divides the effort yet more. Or, if you're no good
at writing code, then write up your experiences for the rest of us! Good
coders are often not so good at writing documentation.
On the wishlist for man - way down it for now, unfortunately, as there
are a load of more serious bugs to be fixed first - is support for SGML
man pages. Maybe that'll go some way to reunifying some of the
documentation. It would be cool to be able to type 'man Font' and get
the Font-HOWTO, although maybe that's a job for a higher-level tool.
>The question is, what does the Linux community want?
Pretty much anything and everything you could name.
--
Colin Watson [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]
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