[TUHS] Another "craft" discussion topic - mindless tool proliferation

Lyndon Nerenberg lyndon at orthanc.ca
Wed Sep 20 10:47:42 AEST 2017


> On Sep 19, 2017, at 4:35 PM, Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:
> 
> If you take a look at how perl handles its man pages, with 188 man
> pages in section 1:

... you quickly recognize the difference between a manpage (i.e. reference page) and a user manual.  Perl's (and other's) attempts to pack a 200 page user guide into a block of manpages is a misuse of what manpages represent.

texinfo was a good move in the direction towards online, cross-referenced, user documentation.  But so often that lead to manpages that consisted of the single line "see the texinfo doc"; the documentation authors completely missing the point.

--lyndon




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