John E. Perry wrote:
Randall R Schulz wrote:
On Tuesday May 26 2009, John E. Perry wrote:
... A curses implementation would have helped, but it was never developed, as far as I know. Konqueror has info: and man: viewers that render the respective documentation entries into a GUI-fied form with mouse-activatable hyperlinks (in the case of info:, anyway).
Arggh! you're right, Randall. I use it all the time. Doesn't help at work, where there's no kde, but at home, it's invaluable.
Got so involved in my argument, I let that one slip by :-).
I guess you also missed the online man pages at sites like http://linux.die.net/man/. It has a top-level list with drill-down, explanatory pages, hyperlinks between related pages (both go-to and come-from). You're criticizing man pages when what you're actually concerned about is the navigation and surrounding features. The concerns are orthogonal, please don't conflate them. Doug, I believe you're also misdirecting your criticsm. You're asking for a different type of documentation. There's no reason that shouldn't exist *as well* as reference documentation like man pages. In fact it does! There are many, many books about how to use Linux written for all different levels of experience and in many styles and there are websites like http://www.tldp.org/ and others. I use man pages regularly and mainly the online copies. I find the suse-supplied browsers to be too much bother to use. I'm with Linda. Keep man pages as they were! Follow the agreed, public standards. Don't break backwards compatibility. The reason we use linux and it is successful is because it is based on open standards. If you want non-conforming behaviour, then add switches to allow it - though I'd suggest it just complicates the code. Making an application or web interface that encapsulates them and provides the functionality is a better direction, IMHO. The real question to me is why John and Doug got involved in this issue? Why don't Konqueror and susehelp already cover their needs so comprehensively that they don't care about Linda's request? Cheers, Dave -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org