Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo's advantage: 'optimized for your system' -- huh?

["Jesús Guerrero" <i92guboj@terra.es>]

El Vie, 6 de Febrero de 2009, 5:40, Stroller escribió:
>
> less [-[+]aBcCdeEfFgGiIJKLmMnNqQrRsSuUVwWX~] [-b space] [-h lines] [-j
> line] [-k keyfile] [-{oO} logfile] [-p pattern] [-P prompt] [-t tag]
> [-T tagsfile] [-x tab,...] [-y lines] [-[z] lines]
> [-# shift] [+[+]cmd] [--] [filename]...
>
>
> doesn't make any sense to the untrained eye. It just looks like
> gobbledegook. There's maybe a Linux n00b manual that explains the syntax
> of man's "Synopsis", but I'm sure I only learned to translate the likes of
> the above after reading man pages for commands that I already knew -
> learned through inference, osmosis and newsgroups.

I have no idea if that's documented in any place.

>> If the problem is "contents" then that's nothing to do with
>> man, but with whomever made (or didn't made) the page.
>
> Yes, but there's a problem with the MAJORITY of contents, perhaps of
> the majority of people writing manpages? It just seems to be a culture of
> the way man pages are written. They make perfect sense only with
> experience - don't get me wrong, I love 'em and at least to a degree I
> think that's how it should be.
>
> But I think the criticism of someone who finds man pages difficult to
> read "your own inadequate ability to read technical documents, ...your own
> capacity for comprehension" is a tad unfair.

Yes. I wasn't implying that you were wrong, just giving
some general tips that could be useful if the problem was
one of those that I was enumerating.

But sometimes, the amount of info to present is simply overwhelming.
To name just a couple of man pages that are really excellent I'd say
that the fvwm and bash ones are really good. But being rather long
they are better suited as reference guides. They are not tutorials,
that's for sure.

That's where the network nature of unix like OSes break into scene,
learning without having access to internet is harder, I can tell
from experience in my beginnings.

About the age of the pages, well, some of the packages are so old
and rarely need updates that they go mostly unmaintained for ages.
It's just a guess anyway.

-- 
Jesús Guerrero