G. Branden Robinson <[email protected]> wrote:
> I agree that Markdown has its place in a documentary ecosystem. The > problem, as is often the case, is less the technology itself, than the > blinkered subculture of "insanely great" that grows up around it. Like the mandoc fanbois you mentioned? :D > We know that Markdown wasn't the be-all, end-all of documentation > formats because it promptly sprouted divergent implementations to solve > problems that Markdown itself could not. Sort of like all the localized extensions to -ms — but that’s not the point. Pick the version that works for you, ignore the rest. >> I need to look into Pikchr, to see if it’s possible to create diagrams >> that work for both it and pic(1). That could be a fun digression, now >> that the kids are all in school and I won’t be on the hook to watch >> them all day. > > I'm curious to hear more about this! I need to add this to my list. Turns out the kids being in school doesn’t automatically give me hours of free time… I’m sure everyone knows how that works. > I know of exactly one real-world application where mandoc(1)'s speed > makes a practical difference. > > The NixOS project generates a 9.8-megabyte man page. Everybody brings > it up all the time and, since the document is unreadable at that length, > instantly starts a full-text search, likely with less(1)'s `/` command. > > https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/514498 Holy guacamole! What the absolute living **** is the motivation behind THAT? And here I was thinking the bash(1) manpage was way too huge. Maybe I should offer my services to slay that beast and chop it into reasonable pieces? I mean, come on. A manpage that runs more than 10 pages (formatted in 11-point type in PDF or printed) is too big. Even the perl(1) folks understood that, and produced a collection of manpages that addressed a specific aspect, while they collected them into a comprehensive manual. Nucking futs. — Larry
