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In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.96.981026232759.10241A-100000@acheta.nervana.montana.edu>
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 1998 00:03:22 -0700 (MST)
Reply-To: root@garbled.net
Organization: garbled.net
From: Tim Rightnour <root@garbled.net>
To: Louis Glassy <glassy@cs.montana.edu>
Subject: RE: Advocacy through Useability?
Cc: netbsd-advocacy@NetBSD.ORG


On 27-Oct-98 Louis Glassy spoke unto us all:
#  Anyway, this is something I'd like to do.  Do any of you
#  have ideas (similar, different, etc) on what's a smart
#  way to go about this?
#  

There is work being done I believe to convert our man pages into html with an
in-tree tool..  This IMHO is a very good thing, and fits your first suggestion
wonderfully.

As for tutorials and examples.. Take a look in /usr/share/doc.  There are some
very good "manuals" in there, though they seem to be a bit dated.

a) the manuals in there are in .me or .ms format (I forget which).  Having a
.me -> html conversion utility would be a wonderful thing.

b) if someone wanted to write examples for things (something I think alot of
people would find very useful.. GNU has something very similar to this floating
around out there) I'm sure it would be accepted into the tree providing it was
done in some sort of sane format.  I think if the tools are in place, .me/.ms
and mandoc formats for writing things would make this sort of thing very
maintainable.

c) Someone has to sit down and do the gruntwork of actually writing all these
tutorials and examples..  Are you volunteering?  ;)

Heh.. actually.. something as big as that is one of those things where if you
built the framework, and started doing some work on it, got some people
together.. I think it could happen.

Perhaps the place to start would be to get the manuals in /usr/share/doc
together and update them to reflect modern reality.

---
Tim Rightnour  -  root@garbled.net
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