"Kevin Stokes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>GNU/Linux is a grown-up's operating system. You're expected to know >your way around, or be able to figure it out.< > > I'm sorry, but the 'You're dumb or lazy or both' argument will not fly. >There is an easily-correctable problem with Linux, and I hope the good >people who devote so much time to Linux will see that.
We're doing our damnedest, and I know I'll accept pretty much any documentation improvements I'm sent. It really grates to be told how the documentation we've spent time writing is worthless without any help being given to improve it, but if help is given then that's always welcome. Given all the effort put in by a lot of people, I don't think it's too presumptuous of me to say that it's not quite as easily correctible as you think. For what it's worth, I think the existing man page framework is fine for this (but then I would say that). Sure, some man pages are useless, and a lot of them are specific to individual programs. A lot of them are general introductions to things as well. There's also info and the HOWTOs. If you want to put some effort into improving Linux's help system, your time would be a lot better spent working on writing code thet indexes all of these in a friendly way (there are already GUI frontends to man, and I'm sure the existing whatis/apropos indices could be levered into a nice graphical index) than coming up with yet another competing format that divides the effort yet more. Or, if you're no good at writing code, then write up your experiences for the rest of us! Good coders are often not so good at writing documentation. On the wishlist for man - way down it for now, unfortunately, as there are a load of more serious bugs to be fixed first - is support for SGML man pages. Maybe that'll go some way to reunifying some of the documentation. It would be cool to be able to type 'man Font' and get the Font-HOWTO, although maybe that's a job for a higher-level tool. >The question is, what does the Linux community want? Pretty much anything and everything you could name. -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
