On Sat, Sep 20, 2025, 10:34 Pádraig Brady <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 20/09/2025 17:08, Alejandro Colomar wrote: > > Hi! > > > > GNU coreutils manual pages are to some degree incomplete. I was told > > today that "tsort(1) is a bad joke". I wonder if you'd be interested in > > moving the maintenance of the manual pages of GNU coreutils to the Linux > > man-pages project, where I could take care of them, and improve their > > contents. > > > > I understand GNU's stance on manual pages, and that you might not be > > interested in improving them much, but maybe you're open to them being > > improved elsewhere. > > > > The Linux man-pages project already documents the GNU C library, so it > > wouldn't be extraneous to also take ownership of the coreutils manual > > pages. > > > > What do you think? > > The man pages are programmatically generated from the sources. > I.e. $cmd --help is processed by help2man. > > All of the man pages have links to the info docs for full documentation. > > Any concise improvements for the man pages are gladly accepted, > but would be applied to the source (also for --help). > > cheers, > Padraig > My initial reason for being a part of this list was because I found the manual pages to be lacking. I do not like 'info'. I do not like hypertext because my brain remembers where something is in a linear file far easier. I want a single page that is text searchable for one word that I am looking for that literally contains every single bit of documentation about the product. I have mentioned that I actually am _exceedingly happy_ with the way that mplayer/ffmpeg manual pages literally have everything all in one place. I cannot claim the same for any of the gnu core utilities because the info command is absolutely mind-boggling in terms of finding something that I need to find easily in the same place. I absolutely know for a fact that the command line arguments for ffmpeg will exist in its manual page, and I know that I don't have to search through perhaps five or 10 separate hyperlinked sections just to find what I need. I simply use textual search. Can 'info' be made to produce this single flat textual representation of its hypertext? If not, then my opinion is still what it was back a few years ago: I would rather have the complete text from the info pages simply copied into a manual page for searching linearly and reading without having to learn a completely different tool which in my 27 years of Linux computing I have yet to understand in any way shape or form other than knowing I hate it and it causes me grief every time I attempt to look at anything detailed about a coreutil command. I lose my place, cannot get back to what I was previously looking at easily, and usually just give up. To me, the command line is not a place for odd to navigate hypertext. I am very comfortable with flat text files and my brain thinks in this fashion. If I want hypertext I will load Chrome. [A similar yet different scenario exists with the way that powershell passes around objects and it is very hard to just get the full bloody information out without it trying to paginate or columnize or summarize in some way. I am absolutely enamored with awk, sed, grep, etc., to textually parse the output of a program to end up with the data I want, as opposed to trying to figure out how to massage an object to show up visually the same way. That's why I prefer shell scripting as opposed to powershell and why I would prefer a single textual man page versus potentially 5 or 10 sections of an 'info' file.] Mike
