On Thu, 6 Jul 2000, Paul Lussier wrote:
> >It isn't just redhat though, there's a lack of manpages for a lot of stuff
> >that people are doing now.
>
> Can you say Gnome, or KDE? There isn't a single man page for either of those,
> nor for any of the apps that come with them. (Well, not entirely true. man -k
> gnome turns up 2 man pages and man -k kde turns up 1)
Yup... I was actually going to write manpages for gnome at one point, but
they wanted to use the latest SGML-tools to convert Doc book to man pages,
rather than write seperate man pages.
While I can see their point (in THEORY it would be much easier) I've
always held that automatically generated manpages are generally crappy,
based on what I've seen. I always hand-write man pages for stuff I write.
That said, I would have done it the other way, but I couldn't get the SGML
tools to work properly (IOW compile), and it's no longer maintained. I'm
just too lazy to expend all that effort. From my perspective, it would
have been easier to write them by hand...
Most of the gnome programs could do with very short man pages anyway, i.e.
just the sort of thing that describes what the program does... For the
programs which have docs written for it, the gnome help browser does an
adequate job of showing you how to use the apps... most often when I'm
looking for man pages for a given gnome command, I just want to know what
it does!
Really all I'm looking for is a short, 5 line man page that tells me what
all the programs do, *INCLUDING* all the programs that you wouldn't
normally call directly. I just want to know what they do...
--
Derek Martin
System Administrator
Mission Critical Linux
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
**********************************************************
To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] with the following text in the
*body* (*not* the subject line) of the letter:
unsubscribe gnhlug
**********************************************************
