Ted Byers said the following on 12/18/2013 07:14 PM:
I did say it was decades ago. But, that was also the last time I had to routinely use a unix machine, until I recently started to refamiliarize myself with unix by studying Suse and Ubuntu Linux. I have not yet had sufficient good experiences with man pages to outweigh the unpleasant memories of the bad experiences of decades ago.
MAN pages have a prosaic and fixed format for a number of reasons and are unlikely to change in format. By definition the sections are there for a set purpose. Learning to read them is no different from learning to read music ('tadpoles on telegraph lines') or the entries in the old Texas TTL handbook of my university days. You need to know the command aliases, the command syntax, the meaning of the flags and parameters, the configuration and context and the semantics. Yes you have to learn to read just as I had to learn to read music and learn to read the TTL handbook. You are never going to have 'good experiences' with MAN pages any more than I had 'good experiences' with music notation. It is what it is. There may be a better way of writing music. I know for sure that there are better keyboard layouts that QWERTY and better keyboard mechanisms (such as those used by court recorders http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOBs25_g23s). On that theme, see http://plover.stenoknight.com/ Yes, its more logical, its faster, so why don't we all give up QWERTY and go with that? The same reason we don't give up on a lot of things that are well established. You really haven't made it clear what your bad experiences were, what were the man pages that were not kept up to date. There are some 8,000+ man pages on my machine. That just what's under /usr/share/man never mind the .pod files or man pages elsewhere. I don't all are of the same quality, even now. How many of the pages years ago suffer from this sysadmin, what were they, how do they compare with their counterparts here now? If still lacking, how do you think they can be improved? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org