[TUHS] man-page style

Chet Ramey chet.ramey at case.edu
Mon Nov 19 13:09:47 AEST 2018


On 11/17/18 10:00 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
> On 2018-11-17 7:31 PM, Donald ODona wrote:
>>
>>
>> At 17 Nov 2018 23:39:45 +0000 (+00:00) from Ralph Corderoy <ralph at inputplus.co.uk>:
>>>
>>> From somewhere that didn't fit in well with Unix.
>> its based on TekInfo, whereas 'Tek' allegedly refers to the anachronistic Tape Editor and Corrector, developed by a student (Dan Murphy) in 1964 on a PDP-1 without a operation system. According to the myth TekInfo was build on top of the Tape Editor, and finally made it on *NIX.
>>
>> 'Info' really doesn't fit in well with Unix. Its alien and another failed approach. Almost all 'GNU' man pages state, that the 'full' documentation is only available via 'info'. In real 99% of all 'info' requests  result in 'info' processing a man page.
> 
> 
> In many notable examples, that is not true: e.g. GNU make, bash or bison
> come quickly to mind. You can't fully learn how to use tools like these
> from the abbreviated man page; for one thing, the man page only mentions
> a fraction of the features.

The man page for bash includes everything. The info manual includes more
examples. I think other authors should follow that model, but I'm not going
to tell a volunteer what he has to do, and I understand how difficult it is
to maintain parallel content.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet at case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/



More information about the TUHS mailing list