Re: umask has no man page?
While I like the dhelp script idea, I think man is a pure UX issue -
man should generally DWIM because if I type "man foo", I don't want to
jump through hoops. There times (looking at libraries and system calls
and the like) that knowing the system helps. However, with >20 (IDR
how many - a bunch) this gets annoying. I think the easiest fix would
be for debian to have a per shell alternatives search
(/etc/alternatives/man/<shell>) that the shell's global rc can prepend
to $MANPATH (of course, I compile zsh from git, so no help for me, but
w/e). This way we can include builtins for shells and they are no
longer there when we switch shells.
On Sun, Nov 2, 2014 at 12:17 PM, Carl Fink <carl@finknetwork.com> wrote:
> However, doesn't the Debian policy manual require a man page for every
> program?
These aren't programs (though, man [ DWIM - guess it's both a program
AND a builtin - ugh) these are a part of your shell - a program, but
it's like arguing that each program function gets a manpage - not
happening.
> Wouldn't that lead users to try the man system to get help on every
> command, since a new or non-technical user would have no way to know that
> umask or read or fg is not a "program" but a personality of Bash? So why
> _not_ have a man page for them?
And I agree with this (again because the man system should try to
DWIM). Just not as a part of a global man system (because that would
fail to DWIM which has already been pointed out for the which
command).
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