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Re: Why? -- "A Modest Proposal"



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On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 04:27:54PM -0500, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 10:23:26PM +0100, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 08:58:55AM -0600, Richard Owlett wrote:
> > > My intention was to focus on two aspects of man pages in general:
> > >   1. they can use improvement
> > 
> > Always. Definitely. Sometimes a tall order: those coming from the
> > Linux man-pages project or from Gnu are generally already quite
> > good.
> 
> The Linux man pages are good, usually.  The GNU man pages are atrocious.
> They even admit it, right in their man pages.  They (as a project, as a
> whole) *hate* man pages and only write a stub that doesn't even cover
> all of the basics.  Then they tell you that the real documentation is
> their GNU-specific "info" page, and you have to go learn an entirely
> new program for reading GNU documentation vs. every other program's
> documentation.

While Gnu does prefer info format to man page format (and they have
their reasons, e.g. info allows links), the man pages (usually derived
from the texinfo source) are well-structured, complete and have a
solid language. I can't agree with you in that they are "atrocious",
barring some exceptions. De gustibus... obviously.

regards
- -- t
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