On Tue, Sep 26, 2017 at 09:09:47AM -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote:
On Mon, Sep 25, 2017 at 02:12:07PM -0700, Don Armstrong wrote:On Mon, 25 Sep 2017, Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Mon, Sep 25, 2017 at 12:20:45PM -0700, Don Armstrong wrote: > > as is documented in dhclient-script(8): > > Well now that's just EVIL. :-( It's much more powerful than a single variable because you can have it do *anything*.No, you don't understand. I had no idea that man page EXISTED! For years, I have been searching back and forth and up and down in dhclient(8) and dhclient.conf(5) and finding NOTHING. Turns out the REASON I couldn't find anything was because some bright spark decided to split the documentation into multiple man pages.> Well now that's just EVIL. :-(So, apparently the only way to find anything is to open umpteen terminal windows, one man page in each terminal window. Jump to the bottom of each man page, find the SEE ALSO section, open EVERY linked man page in another terminal window. Recursively. Then perform your searches in every single window in parallel until one of them hits.
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All this grief and agony because they couldn't just put all the information that THE MOST COMMON USE CASES will need into a single document.
[tl;dr] I think you might be under a misconception about what man pages are FOR. From the first few lines of "man man": man - an interface to the on-line reference manualsThey are *reference* manuals. I believe that the point of man pages is to answer questions such as:
* What's the option for filtering out files: --filter or --exclude* What was that weird option for doing something dangerous "DoWhatIWant"... "YesIReallyMeanThis"... something like that.
* Can I perform this action recursively?As a result, man pages are usually little more than lists of command line parameters which explanations of what they do.
What man pages generally DON'T cover are: * How do I use this program for X? * Why do I need this program? * What the difference between this program and that program? * How do I use this program with that program?The GNU solution to that was the 'info' system. 'info' is a hyperlinked text format - a bit like having a web site on your computer. Look at the info page for grub, as an example: the information is grouped by topic, there's obscure things like limitations on the core size per platform and so on.
It's just a pity that most programs don't provide info pages. -- For more information, please reread.
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