4 ms·
I dunno, I find them much better than most of the documentation I've worked with. I agree with you for beginners, since when I first started reading man pages
by bpchaps 10y ago
I dunno, I find them much better than most of the documentation I've worked with. I agree with you for beginners, since when I first started reading man pages and such, I wanted to rip my eyes out. But after a while, once I learned why the documentation was written the way it was, the flow of it started to make more and more sense. Though, in a lot of ways this comes from personal opinions that gnu tools and by extension, gnu/linux, should be difficult in the worse-is-better sense.
These days, when looking at documentation, my go-to example for awful documentation is salt. Because, well, this is utter bullshit:
$ man salt 2>/dev/null | wc -l
133324
- catnaroek 10y agoI find GNU info more useful than man pages as documentation for those who are learning how to use a program. The documentation is structured and hyperlinked in a very convenient way. On the other hand, the terseness of man pages is more convenient for those who already mostly know the program, but need a reminder of minor details like the exact command line flag to enable a specific program option.
- bpchaps 10y agoAgreed, but unfortunately info is used so infrequently that I don't even bother with it these days.
- jandrese 10y ago95% of the time when I'm opening a manpage I am looking for a particular command line option or syntax. With man pages I just hit / and then a relevant keyword and it jumps to the right section. With info pages I have to grok which section it might be in, then remember what arcane ctrl sequence follows links and then what sequence searches in the document then which sequence goes back because I guessed wrong. I find manpages to be much more convienent, even though they are less structured.