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

[Stroller <stroller@stellar.eclipse.co.uk>]

On 5 Feb 2009, at 23:03, Saphirus Sage wrote:
>> ...
>> Man pages are notoriously bad. The gentoo handbook and other official
>> docs are great OTOH.
>>
>
> Man pages notoriously bad?! Now that's a stance I can hardly  
> understand,
> they've always been a godsend in my experience! Just practice using a
> command a few times, look through the options and learn it in the  
> period
> of ten minutes, and a man page has done its purpose. If this stance is
> due to your own inadequate ability to read technical documents, then  
> do
> not apply the lacking to anything but your own capacity for  
> comprehension.

To be fair there is an "art" to reading manpages.

Manpages tend to be terse yet authoritative, but it was only after  
(perhaps) a couple of years of using Unix (and perhaps longer) that I  
learned to appreciate them.

I think manpages tend to assume that the reader is already proficient  
with Unix and often that the reader is familiar with regular  
expressions. They tend to use the academic language of computer  
science which may be completely baffling to someone who is technically  
& logically very competent but self-taught.

My experience is that only after learning the syntax of manpages (is  
that itself documented?) do I find most of them tremendously easy to  
navigate to find the one specific option I'm looking for.

Stroller.