Subject: RE: FVWM: configuring fvwm2

From: Jeff Walker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2001 09:03:17 -0600

I do too.  I think the fvwm man page is great.  It just took me a while to
get thru it, but that is because there is so much to get thru.

One thing that zsh has done is split it up into smaller chunks (man zsh, man
zshbuiltins, man zshexpn, etc.), and then also have "meta-manpage" that
includes all of it (man zshall).  I always fire up the whole thing "man
zshall" and then search for what I want.  Without that, I would be lost,
because, if I was stuck and didn't know what to do, I wouldn't necessarily
know which man page to look in.

I also, absolutely hate the Linux documentation is moving; that is, having a
man page that is a summary (at best) or not even there or out of date, and
having the real doc in "info" format.  I hate that.  On Unix, I expect the
man pages to at least have a proper command-line usage, if not the entire
documentation.  (okay, off the soapbox, back to your cell...)

-- 
Jeff Walker                   MatchLogic, Inc.
[email-masked]        7233 Church Ranch Blvd.
Voice 1 (303) 222-2105        Westminster, CO  80021
Fax   1 (303) 222-2001        www.matchlogic.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Randy Schultz [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Friday, August 10, 2001 7:37 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: FVWM: configuring fvwm2

On Thu, 9 Aug 2001, Perry Hutchison spaketh thusly:

-{> We've had complaints that the fvwm man page is too big.
-{> Someone claimed that it was the largest man page ever created,
-{> but we found a couple that are larger.
-{
-{Maybe convert most of it to an "info" and make the manpage a
-{summary .... NOT!!!
-{
-{Why would anyone object to a large manpage?  Beats having to look
-{in unexpected places, and/or not having complete docs at all.

Here here!  I love having this monster man page that I can bop around in
checking things out.

--
Randy    ([email-masked])  715-726-2832          <*>

The Penguin Cometh

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---

From: Nix <[email-masked]>
Date: 12 Aug 2001 00:26:53 +0100

On Fri, 10 Aug 2001, Jeff Walker spake:
> documentation.

I think you are talking about GNU projects when you say `Linux
documentation'. The GNU Project has long had the policy of maintaining
primary documentation in texinfo format, because that is convertible to
more output formats than troff, and is more expressive. Sometimes, man
pages for some projects were separately maintained, but they always got
out of date.

However, recently the GNU help2man program was released to convert the
invocation sections of info pages to man pages, and new releases of GNU
projects are tending to use this to generate up-to-date man pages at
last.

(Also, I don't think it's info pages you dislike; it's the standalone
info *reader*, which is horrible. There are much better combined
man/info readers out there, like tkman; find one you like and use it,
and you'll soon ignore the source of your documentation --- except that
info pages are often better written and less terse than man pages ;) )

-- 
`It's all about bossing computers around. Users have to say "please".
Programmers get to say "do what I want NOW or the hard disk gets it".'
                        -- Richard Heathfield on the nature of programming
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