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

[Michael Parson]

On 2017-09-21 19:36, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 10:02:07AM +1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>> On Thursday, 21 September 2017 at 20:39:24 +0200, Steffen Nurpmeso 
>> wrote:
>> > Tony Finch <dot at dotat.at> wrote:
>> >
>> >> I think it's a shame that the non-man-page parts of the Unix
>> >> documentation set have been neglected, in that you don't often get
>> >> newer programs following the style of the USD / SMM / PSD guides.
>> >
>> > The problem being that even FreeBSD dropped them from the base
>> > system.
>> 
>> There was a good reason for that.  To my recollection, they hadn't
>> been maintained At All, and they were decades out of date.  While they
>> were interesting for their historical content, as user/programmer
>> documentation they were useless at best and misleading or dangerous at
>> worst.
> 
> That's really on the maintainers, it's a shame they haven't kept those
> up to date.  Either update them or add to them, there has to be 
> something
> worth writing up.
> 
> I used to *love* those manuals.

I still love those manuals.  The printed set of the BSD manuals were 
some of the first books I ordered off the Internet back in the early 
1990s.  Well worn, but still on my shelf.  I learned a lot from them, 
including *roff from the URM docs.

I got excited when I first installed NetBSD on my Amiga 3000 and saw 
that (most of) those docs were in the tree.

-- 
Michael Parson
Pflugerville, TX
KF5LGQ