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

[Grant Edwards <grante@visi.com>]

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On 2009-02-06, Neil Bothwick <neil@digimed.co.uk> wrote:
> On Fri, 6 Feb 2009 08:17:46 +0100 (CET), Jesús Guerrero wrote:
>
>> Well, in that sense, ALL the man pages of for anything that's more
>> complext than ls will be horrible. There's no way to can shorten
>> it unless you take features off from bash. It's a very powerful
>> shell.
>> 
>> Same goes for my other example: fvwm.
>
> And for mplayer/mencoder. The problem is that man pages are
> single pages and therefore only suitable for fairly short
> documents. The alternative, as used by zsh, is to split the
> information into several man pages, then you never know which
> one to look at. procmail is a good example of how to do this
> badly, with procmailrc's documentation being split across
> three man pages.
>
> That's why info is a much better format for complex or
> multipurpose programs.

That's one opinion, but I think info very difficult to use.  I
much prefer a single page.  Stuff in info is always broken up
into pieces that are way too small.  Whatever organization
there is supposed to be in info is impossible to perceive while
you're looking at a page, and it's way to easy to end up in
documentation for something completely unrelated.

> You'd expect to find a list of contents, chapters and an index
> in a printed reference book, electronic documentation should
> be no different.

Perhaps, but I think info is an awful implementation.  A single
large man page is much better, and a single large html page
with links in it is far, far, better.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow! HELLO, everybody,
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