Subject: Re: What information belongs into man pages?
To: Hauke Fath <hauke@Espresso.Rhein-Neckar.DE>
From: David Griffith <dgriffi@cs.csubak.edu>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 10/19/2006 12:56:36
On Thu, 19 Oct 2006, Hauke Fath wrote:

> At 8:46 Uhr +0200 19.10.2006, Alan Barrett wrote:
> >I think that the man pages are references, and that we should care
> >deeply about their quality.  I think that it's useful to provide some
> >tutorial material, much as you have done in this case, but that we
> >should stop short of making the man pages a "how to learn to be a
> >programmer" guide book.
>
> There's the rub. In daily use, I appreciate NetBSD's man pages for their
> concise terseness. Look at the typical Linux Distributions for examples of
> what a man page should not be. It's called "man page" for a reason...

One of my big peeves with Linux is the conspicuous lack of manpages for
various daemons.  Or else they have a stub of a manpage that tells me to
look at the info page, which is frequently absent.

-- 
David Griffith
dgriffi@cs.csubak.edu

A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
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