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Re: Question about the return value of 'local'


From: Steven W. Orr
Subject: Re: Question about the return value of 'local'
Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2012 12:16:53 -0500
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0 Thunderbird/17.0

On 12/14/2012 12:07 PM, Bill Gradwohl wrote:
I'm not trying to start a war, but ...

Has anyone entertained the idea of getting rid of the man pages and the
info system? Those are relics of the tty era. We have graphical interfaces
today with capabilities that could enhance providing and then finding
better information.

Wouldn't a browser based html page be more helpful?  Anyone on a non GUI
could use lynx to read the pages, or make man pull up lynx to keep the
command structure the same.

The basic page could be what man is now, more or less, and the ability to
drill down would provide more and more information the deeper you drill.
Code snippets could highlight idiosyncratic behavior at boundary conditions
while other examples demonstrate the main emphasis.

A WIKI set up could allow people to augment the docs with some authority
then editing the content to keep it up to some standard. Greg's site is
excellent, as are several others, and that's the issue. There is no one
authoritative place to go to get the OFFICIAL docs in a modern form. Who
wants to learn how to write and submit man or info docs when the future is
clearly html, especially when neither man nor info has the rendering
capability html has?

If the Linux community as a whole missed one technical release cycle to
instead concentrate on properly documenting what already exists, the effort
would pay off in spades for all future releases.


Die Infidel! ;-)

You will find no problem viewing man or info pages in html. They are all over the web for a reason. TeXInfo was designed to produce either info files or DVI. From the DVI, you can do anything you want, including convert to html.

I'm not wild about software (or associated docs) that's maintained in a wiki. It kinda violates the notion of a stable picture of what's in a release.

Steve Orr




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