brian m. carlson wrote: > Topological sorting requires a list of directed edges. In order to > describe these edges, one must have at least two pieces of information > per edge, namely the vertices defining that edge. tsort presumably > requires some specific format for this information, but the manual page > does not say what it is. Thus, a user cannot be expected to make any > reasonable use of tsort based on reading only the manual page. > > The manual page should be improved so that a user can determine what > input format tsort takes by reading the manual page alone.
This illustrates a basic philosophical difference between GNU systems
and traditional Unix systems. In a traditional Unix system the
standard for documentation was the man page. Mostly because there
wasn't anything better. But as "GNU is not Unix" the GNU system
vision was to improve upon Unix. One area of improvement was
documentation. Man pages have been around for a very long time but
they also have a lot of drawbacks. It isn't suitable for printing as
a book. There is no linking between manuals. Other things.
Therefore in the upstream GNU system the preferred documentation
format is texinfo documentation which was specifically designed for
those needs.
And so with GNU tsort the preferred upstream documentation format is
texinfo manual. All of your questions are answered in the texinfo
documentation. The man page acknowledges this and directs you to the
info documenation. The man page says:
The full documentation for tsort is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If
the info and tsort programs are properly installed at your site, the
command
info coreutils 'tsort invocation'
should give you access to the complete manual.
On a Debian system that command will give you access to the full tsort
manual. If you don't like the default 'info' (because perhaps you are
a vi key user) then you may also use 'pinfo' or 'info --vi-keys'
instead to get vi-style keybinding.
pinfo coreutils 'tsort invocation'
info --vi-keys coreutils 'tsort invocation'
Your bug report implies that there isn't any documentation on the
tsort input format. But that is incorrect since there *is*
documentation on it. The documentation is in texinfo format. And it
describes the input format that you are wishing to know about.
Did you look at the texinfo documentation for tsort as described in
the man page?
Bob
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