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

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon at orthanc.ca> wrote:
 |> 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.

I absolutely agree with that.  It is like Hubbard laughing about
"how easy anything suddenly is".  I think there are different
variants of letting go.
..And then many HTML versions of texinfo manuals use the split
version and then you have pages with a sentence or two, which can
drive you mad.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)