I would like to add a few more comments from the standpoint of a user who has found the availability of documentation to be a major strong point in the favor of emacs and linux (previously slackware, and the LDP). Some of these are isolated miscellaenous remarks, and do not address questions that have been brought up previously in this thread, ie., concerning a unified documentation interface.
1. the info system documenting the use of emacs lisp and the emacs editor, being on line, have been a major help to me, and I don't see how it really needs to be improved. I also find that when documetation is available in info format, my productivity is enhanced. I have to agree with comments attributed to Richard Stallman that major efforts should be directed toward improvement of this system; perhaps the concerns of this group would be advantageoulsy integrated into such development. Perhaps even expansion of texinfo to interconvertibility to SGML/HTML would address certain concerns brought up in this discussion? (Is this really that great of a difference from what has been suggested?) Certain strong points of emacs and info have been in searching capabilities, and in the latter case perhaps this could be enhanced; with a database of some kind---perhaps automatically produced from various kinds of documentation files---this kind of search could be incorporated into the intended unified documentation interface. 2. The apropos or whatis command may provide something of a prototype for an indexing function for a built in unified interface. It is currently of more limited value, but could be set up to directly call the man function if one needed more, or to search through lists. Maybe some of the needed functionality is already there. 3. Linux documentation has also been extremely helpful, although for sure it could be more easy to access (I was encouraged to see one or two documents in info format on the debian tree, but I have not been able to get them to work!). Ever since Slackware has gotten into CDROMs, the excellent LDP and even HOWTOs have been somewhat in a state of stasis. For example the installation how to of slackware has not even been upgraded to reflect the differences in the names of disk sets. This was a strong calling card for Linux from the beginning, but the documentation on line has fallen behind. (Intended to not belittle the immense effort that HAS been going into documentation). The Debian Manual is not very helpful, at this point, once one has the relatively simple task of installing the base system in hand (I have not been able to get info or texi versions to work on my system, however). Again, I write as a user. Most or perhaps all of the responses to my earlier post favored a change to HTML. Maybe at this point a man page is needed to help the new user to get into the various sorts of documentation, even given an intention to develop a unified interface. Alan Davis
