Re: Building prog first

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

You say that the manuals are poor and that it is obvious, but I cannot
figure out from your explanation how they are poor.  I've looked at a
few manuals, glibc, emacs, coreutils, autoconf, and m4, and all of
them have good indices, are organised cleanly, etc.

Can you mention one or two manuals, and which part of those manuals
you find to be inadequate?

You mention that web access improves the manuals, how do they do that
exactly?  If you do a web search, then you will invariable end up at
the manual, no? 

If our manuals are not read and users think that reporting bugs,
improving them, is a waste of our time, then it would be better that
we remove them, since keeping them updated takes alot of time, more so
than actually improving our programs.  But users clearly need manuals,
as from your experience, and a bad manual is just as much a bug as
anything else in our programs.

Please don't think that improving a manual is any less of an
improvment than adding a very useful feature.