Cristian Rodríguez wrote:

Linda Walsh escribió:

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In SuSE 11.1, the behavior of man seems to be "broken"

It is not broken, but different. simply follow Claes advice to get back the old behaviour.

---- Black is white and white is black...I know the drill... So why shouldn't newly created users have had a export NEXPERT_VERBOSE=1 to their profiles, rather than changing the behavior for old users? That is sorta what it is, isn't it? The suse proj/team is adding more user-friendly features for non-experts...which they want to default on for new users... Seems like 1 flag set for newly created users in the default template would do it. Then older users could ask for that behavior by setting it in their profile or they'd retain the older 'brevity-first' behavior by default? I do understand the desire and direction...but wish they'd do it in a way to default in changes for new users and 1 global to toggle off all of the newer 'help added' features.... Could be overridden with tool-by-tool switches, but when individual tool switch (i.e. MAN_POSIXLY_CORRECT) isn't present, go with global .. and making the new switch "MAN_POSIXLY_CORRECT makes it sound like a negative -- usually it removes added gnu functionality like added switches and such...but in this case, it's reverting to previous gnu behavior. Or...is this the new 'gnu' man trend as well?...(Ick!) (sigh) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Patrick Shanahan wrote:

* Linda Walsh [01-01-70 11:34]:

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Black is white and white is black...I know the drill...

So why shouldn't newly created users have had a export NEXPERT_VERBOSE=1

to their profiles, rather than changing the behavior for old users?

That is sorta what it is, isn't it? The suse proj/team is adding more user-friendly features for non-experts...which they want to default on for new users... Seems like 1 flag set for newly created users in the default template would do it.

Humm, might be a good time to get your feet wet and submit a bug report suggesting that the "default" for 11.1 is not optimal and should be as it was :^).

Anxious to see the report number...

If ya promise it will help... :-) Sure! :-) (don't worry, won't hold ya to it). My feet are wet/w muck...I have quite a few bug#'s under my name, with mixed results. I put alot more into bug reports than I usually get out of them. But response is _better_ on SuSE projects & products than I get on most. But am generally a medium-core bug-filer, especially for bugs with no easy workaround (like this one has), so it's really down in the annoyance level -- and when people go to fix bugs, bugs with a low severity (annoyance & workaround provided), often don't get looked at with the loads of more serious bugs on their plate. It's not like the solution used for SuSE would be incompatible with any other distro, so it's a low-cost workaround for me. Where I get hackles raised more is when I have to do something or SuSE that makes it not work in other environments. I'll see if I can get around to a bug report on this 'annoyance'... :-) -linda -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

D. McGarrett wrote:

Linda Walsh wrote:

...

Cristian Rodríguez wrote:

...

... OS's contributors take a more friendly view of their possible users, and make the system more user-friendly. I hate to say, more Windows-like, but at least more DOS/CPM like. Well, flame me, I suppose, but I think this would be useful.

...so, Doug, let me deflect the flames from you by attracting them to myself :-). I've used unix for decades, and I've always despised the stupid man paradigm. Basically, to find anything in man, you have to know it already, and even apropos doesn't help a lot. A curses implementation would have helped, but it was never developed, as far as I know. Gnu info promised a better environment, but it was sabotaged by the keyboard-only mindset of its writers, so it's not much of an improvement. For an example of _good_ man pages written by old-line experts who weren't chained to obsolete paradigms, take a look the documentation at www.tcl.tk. This is a beautiful example of what modern paradigms can do with a few simple mouse clicks (really, now, does anyone here _not_ have a mouse?). Html is _so_ much better a way to find your needed information, even if you already know it all. If you don't, man and info are more hindrances than helps. So now, you're safe, Doug :-). John Perry -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Patrick Shanahan wrote:

* John E. Perry [05-26-09 20:43]:

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Html is _so_ much better a way to find your needed information, even if you already know it all. If you don't, man and info are more hindrances than helps.

I fail to see that html of a vague man page is of any more help than the text version, but you are welcome to it.

Patrick, even if the man page is "vague", good documentation (like the tcl/tk documentation) starts with a list of all available commands with brief descriptions of what they are and do. Then hyperlinks take you to the page itself, which starts by listing all the options with brief descriptions of what they are and do. Then hyperlinks take you to the details, which, as you point out, depend a great deal upon the attention the programmers devote to them. Finally, hyperlinks cross-link to similar and dependent commands. Sure, you still have to do the reading, but you don't spend all your time trying to find something you're not even sure exists, or something that attracted your attention deep in the text, but turns out not to be relevant.

The man pages *are* of little use to those who refuse to read or try to read them.

Ah, yes, the old sneer that "it's your own fault this piece of crap doesn't help you because you won't use it." Well, guess what, Patrick -- I do read them. I don't have a choice. Between my shelf of unix/linux books and the man pages, I eventually find what I need. When I say I've _used_ unix for decades, I mean just that. I'm not a systems administrator; not a systems programmer; usually not even an applications programmer, although I have done a good deal of that. So I don't get to use the man pages enough to memorize them. I need reminding of what's available, as the tcl documentation gives me. As an (usually) embedded systems engineer, and linux user mainly in protest against Microsoft's depredations, I don't get to sift through the man pages every day, over and over again. I have work to do that doesn't involve unix or linux, and an outside life that has interests other than linux commands. man wastes a good deal of my time. You must remember that they are usually written by the

programmer who is a programmer, and not necessary a linguistics expert.

I'm quite aware of that, and that fact makes it even more important to have a _good_, _modern_ base for building documentation. You do have the option of contributing a *better* version of

the man page that you find lacking, rather than just bashing the writer/ programmer for his poor efforts, in your eyes.

Now you're deliberately misunderstanding me, as I expected. I don't have that option. I don't know enough about unix/linux, even after all these part-time years, and I don't have the time. Or, to be honest, the will.

...

So now, you're safe, Doug :-).

from you, but there is a large world looking on.

But no one has lit into Doug yet :-).

and I do not require a mouse to read man pages :^).

Nor do I. In fact, as I mentioned above, I _can't_ use one :-(. jp -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

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 :-). jp -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Dave Howorth wrote: <SNIP>

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.

I am one of those Unix dinosaurs, and as such, based on others' comments, I should hate the change in default behavior. But I do not...I find the new behavior to be better, in that it shows me, and allows me to conveniently access, any and all sections. The only (or at least primary) reason for maintaining backwards compatible behavior, is to avoid breaking scripts, etc. But who uses man commands in scripts? They are designed to run interactively, with a user on the other end. If you are a noob, you will still get the old result if you just let it time out. Or if two seconds +/- annoys you, you can alias man to a man command with a switch (-S list-of-sections-to-return). Or if you are too noob to know how to do that, you probably don't even know what the old behavior was. info was an attempt at enhancing documentation. And it has at best been a mixed success. I only use it when I don't find what I want in the man pages, or when the man pages tell me that the good stuff is in info. I go first to man, because that is where I am most likely to find at least a definition of my options, and a brief explanation of issues and incompatibilities. Let's not dumb down Linux just for backward compatibility, when in reality, such compatibility affects nothing except a (removable) brief pause to display your other section options. Now I'll sit back and see who tries to come up with a convoluted example of a meaningful script that gets broken by the default behavior being changed. Dan PS vi rules, if you take the time to learn how to use it. (Taking a bit of time to learn an editor beats taking a lot of time to use an editor, anytime.) And the time to do so is a lot less than the time to learn the Wordstar-like multi-key sequences of Emacs. Plus, if you have to get on many different machines, many of which you don't control, depending on Emacs leaves you on the dock when the ship sails, at least part of the time. I have yet to find a Unix, POSIX-like, Linux distro, or other non-M$ system that didn't have a fully functioning vi on it, (unless you count the times the machine is down hard. ) And if you are trying to recover a machine that is down hard with Emacs, good luck...hope you have a bootable USB key with you and the box has a bootable USB port. ;-) "Real hackers know how to use vi, even if they prefer Emacs. But if you really know vi, what do you need Emacs for?" ;-) Using Emacs is like carrying around a top of the line Swiss Army knife AND a fully-loaded multi-took knife in your pocket at all times, just so you can cut something open if you need to. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

I'll respond to several at once, here; I'll also avoid the religious fanatics' frothing over editors :-). Dave Howorth wrote:

...

...

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).

Yep. I'd never heard of it at all. Thanks for the tip; it's really nice. Maybe even better than Konqueror.

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.

Not altogether orthogonal. As you and Joachim point out, xman and tkman provide a decent navigation method for raw man pages. I'd looked at xman many years ago, and just now looked at it again. I abandoned it then because it gives no description of the commands -- you get a list of thousands of strings with no way to see what any particular string means. Twenty-five years ago it wasn't much help; I had to struggle through books and/or beg for help from regular unix users. Even now most of the strings are meaningless to me. tkman is not on my machine; I'll look for it later tonight to see what it has to offer. linux.die.net/man/ goes a long way toward fixing that problem, although many of the descriptions are about as cryptic as the command names themselves :-). The nice thing about konqueror is that it's always available on my machine; the nice thing about die.net is that it's available wherever I have an internet connection. That's not the case on some of the Tru64 and Modcomp Classic machines I have to deal with, but many of them do have internet access. (I wonder whether the machines that won't compile anything newer than Netscape 3 will work with die.net.)

... I use man pages regularly and mainly the online copies. I find the suse-supplied browsers to be too much bother to use.

But, Dave, you already know it all. We don't. We need the help.

I'm with Linda. Keep man pages as they were! Follow the agreed, public standards. ...Making an application or web interface that encapsulates them and provides the functionality is a better direction, IMHO.

I agree wholeheartedly. But such is not yet available to us, with the slightly flawed exceptions of Konqueror and (now that I've learned about it) linux.die.net.

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?

Have my last two responses answered that question? Carlos E. R. wrote:

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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.

Then, try "pinfo".

john@embelex:~> pinfo bash: pinfo: command not found What does it do? Is it worthwhile for me to find and install it? Joachim Schrod wrote:

Having struggled for the last few days to learn more about HAL, ConsoleKit, and PackageKit, I would have loved if there would be man pages that are as succinct and precise as they are for standard Single Unix(tm) functionality. Instead one follows one Web site to the other with horrible formatting and unstructured information. There is a reason why POSIX followed the man page paradigms in its write up, there is even a rational in the standard.

No argument here, There's no good reason for web sites to have horrible formatting and unstructured information. Indeed, that's my beef with man pages -- often thousands of lines of text with no help finding what you want. Sure, there's primitive formatting, but it doesn't help those of us who don't already know it all.

Concerning curses implementation -- why not a GUI? For the old timers, there has always been xman and tkman, of course. Both also provide a browser for man pages.

I mentioned curses because it was already widespread when I first got into computing in the late '70's -- I had it on my CoCo I in 1982, and curses had just been introduced with Microware's OS-9 system for the CoCo. It was as close to a GUI as most systems could support. And did windowing and navigation pretty well. Now I use konqueror and, maybe, die.net. Don't really need curses. jp -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

John E. Perry wrote:

john@embelex:~> pinfo bash: pinfo: command not found

What does it do? Is it worthwhile for me to find and install it?

You look it up at die.net and see what the man page says, of course! :) Actually, I have a meta-index. I submit this query to google: pinfo site:die.net And that query is coded into a form on my firefox home page, along with other forms for linux searches, wikipedia searches, CPAN searches etc. So what I really do is bring up a browser window, type 'pinfo' into a textbox and hit return. Cheers, Dave -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Thursday, 2009-05-28 at 10:46 -0400, John E. Perry wrote:

So pinfo is a lynx-style info browser. So far, trying it, the only difference I see is the highlighting, which is helpful.

After giving pinfo a brief spin, I like konqueror and die.net much better, but if it's available -- and if info is available -- on the ancient unix systems at work, it would make things nicer there.

You can't use konq in text mode, for instance. Compared to "info", "pinfo" also displays man pages, and can navigate them. And it has a more intuitive keyboard interface than "info". - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkofBgYACgkQtTMYHG2NR9X3/ACfVR5UkFgg1ipaxvv6MvatYDiu K6EAoJNBgwmUDaXgKd+B25XAsxOABOHc =SM24 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

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).

Also, with Konqueror, you can hit Alt-F2# for man or Alt-F2## for info -- Use OpenOffice.org http://www.openoffice.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

D. McGarrett wrote:

Linda Walsh wrote:

...

So why shouldn't newly created users have had a: 'export NEXPERT_VERBOSE=1' added to their profiles, rather than changing the behavior for old users? It seems like 1 flag set for newly created users in the default template would do it. Then older users could ask for that behavior by setting it in their profile or they'd retain the older 'brevity-first' behavior by default. I do understand the desire and direction...but wish they'd do it in a way to default in changes for new users and 1 global to toggle off all of the newer 'help added' features....

I would like to comment: many users (I would guess) of Linux OS's, are not used to UNIX systems, which Linux basically copies. MAN pages are not very helpful to those who are not in the IT business. (Perhaps even to them, as many of the inputs to this forum have shown.) Many of the books which are available for Linux seem to assume a familiarity with UNIX. It is time that the OS's contributors take a more friendly view of their possible users, and make the system more user-friendly. I hate to say, more Windows-like, but at least more DOS/CPM like. Well, flame me, I suppose, but I think this would be useful. --doug

Doug: Thank-you for providing an example of what I was talking about. Your understanding of unix/linux and the situation at hand is very clear from your response. I'll try to make my suggestion sound more reasonable: My suggestion was to *add* a flag in the 'registry' **nix profile) for new users, that set a global-session value for that user named "NEXPERT_VERBOSE" to a value meaning "True". That would mean that for a __new user__, the default would be to consider them "Not-an-Expert and/or to turn on VERBOSE prompting and HELP, where (and when) it gets implemented. Only "older" users who already were using linux or already had linux profiles setup (i.e. not copied from a previous upgrade) would NOT have that switch added to their 'registry' ... then new users, like yourself, could more full featured help, while older users would remain unaffected. Does that seem reasonable and does that address your concern of *nix's "default", "terse" feedback: sometimes considered unfriendly, but by 'expert'** users, it's usually considered 'noise'. ** - 'expert' a double-edged-term useful for shooting one's self in the foot, if one is not very careful. This way, it seems, 'both' camps can get what they want. In no way, do I hope you feel 'flamed' or whatever, because what you are saying is 'right-on'. It just needs to be done to meet the needs of new users and veteran. As for the sparseness or technical nature of *nix documentation -- it was developed by University level students who were experts in computing, but often not expert in user-friendly design. Design has focused on 'functionality', not form (which has long been a major stick-in-the-eye for *nix acceptance in the market place). Conversely, windows (and Apple) have often dumbed-down and limited interfaces' functionality for fear of frightening the users -- leaving more flexible functionality out. Both Windows and Mac, are moving in the direction of increasing restrictions on what you can do on your computer -- MS recently got a patten for restricting what you can do on your OS, unless you pay them for allowing you more freedom! So be aware of the 'other side' of the coin... of simplifying. Note, major changes in utils that are worth of note (not entire release histories, but only major changes from previous additions), can be put in one-time emails sent out to root (as is sometimes (often?) done now when new packages are updated). -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org