You know, at risk of contradicting myself here.
rhkra...@gmail.com schreef op 30-12-2016 3:23:
There is noting magic about man pages--what I'm trying to say is that,
someone
could start writing something similar to man pages, with all the detail
or
introductory / explanatory material you (they) might want. Maybe call
them
bman (for beginner man) pages?
There's no point to this. Adding this (short) introductory and
tutorial-like text to existing man pages (for instance) does not destroy
the terseness and effectiveness of the remaining and existing
detail-oriented documentation that already exists.
So people are arguing against something that would only be an addition,
and not a detriment.
There is no reason against it. There is no argument against it. It's
like saying we shouldn't have a plant in the home because it would
destroy the nice empty feeling the room has. Or we shouldn't have a a
table because the curtains look so nice. Without one.
There is no argument against it unless that were specific to what you
wanted to add, because the thing that already exists is not reduced when
you do add it.
Like I said, Grep, one of the most iconic man pages probably, and there
are more of them, does include that introductory text that Catherine
says shouldn't be there.
You really want to take that away from there? No you don't. Because
Catherine does not really mean what she says, she just wants to prevent
efforts at making man pages more accessible. Right.
Every man page has a description that Catherine now says should not be
there. Here, her literal words:
Oh and yes, mentioning someone else's behaviour to another person is not
an ad hominem attack Catherine. That would be if you directed that
language at the person directly, in most cases. These words would be
directed at other people about you. That is not an ad hominem, that is
being descriptive about a person that does a certain thing because this
certain thing is the subject matter being discussed. Deal with it.
Catherine's literal words: "If you do not know what a command basically
does, a man page is not the place to go."
From the Grep man page:
"grep searches the named input FILEs (or standard input if no files are
named, or if a single hyphen-minus (-) is given as file name) for lines
containing a match to the given PATTERN. By default, grep prints the
matching lines."
The "incumbent" design of the man page:
NAME
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION <-- see that there?
OPTIONS
Next Catherine uses the quoted introductory text to learn what a command
basically does:
"I am not familiar with aufs, but I learned from the example of "bad
writing" you posted that it is a filesystem utility, that it loads
things in a specific sequence that has to be kept in mind when using the
command, and that you wanted your specific solution laid out for you in
the man page instead of figuring it out yourself."
She basically uses it for something she says it is not meant to be used
for.
Can you become more insincere than this? Can you contradict yourself
more than this, I wanted to say?
You _USE_ it for that purpose and then you say that it shouldn't be used
for it. You do it yourself. But you basically say that that DESCRIPTION
text that is PART of the incumbent design of the "man page" shouldn't be
there, so you now also disagree with that design you try to use as an
excuse for your position.
The fact is simply that people do not want Linux to be easier for novice
users.
And then they use any excuse they can to keep it so.
They will attack and destroy any attempt at improving the situation for
those novice users. Because, as Catherine here puts it "If you are
looking at a man page you are doing non-trivial non-noob things and
should abandon the noob mindset." Or perhaps more directly: "Those users
were never expected to look at a man page." which basically translates
to "Those users should not be looking at a man page at all".
I mean these attitudes are always voiced here, this is nothing peculiar
or specific to miss Gramze, pardon me for that.
It is not specific to Debian either, you will find the same on any forum
almost (not like everywhere, but still) as well as lists for other
distributions.
But I guess I am making a fool of myself here, so I will keep this
short.
People have an elitist attitude and they don't want "ordinary" people to
be able to do the same stuff they can do.
So they keep documentation scarce and bad not because it is better this
way, but because it will prevent those people learning to use Linux in
an easy way. There are no arguments against improving documentation
other than that it would threaten your position as one of the few who
actually get this thing.
It is a "should" thing, not a factual thing. Why do we keep man pages
bad? Because novices "should" abandon the noob mindset. Well pardon me
dear people, I have been Linux too since 1996 (brag brag) and I am
greatly offended by the bad state of the documentation because it costs
ME a lot of TIME.
Attributing a noobish mindset to me is just an insult. I know more about
Linux than most people know about flowers, plants, walls and ceilings.
Yet the style much documentation is written in costs me more time. I see
no reason to be spending more time because I "should" get to that
information the hard way, or because I "should" expend blood, sweat and
tears getting that knowledge.
This "I don't want to explain anything to you" mindset and attitude,
..., "because I want you to work hard for it, like I did". And "it
shouldn't be easy". "You should expect it to be rough". All that sort of
crap right.
It just costs endless seas of time to anyone, novice or not-novice
alike. You could explain it a better way but you don't. Why? There is no
why. The why is that you don't want people to get easy information.
And then Lisi here pretends that derailing the dicussion will land her
much favour and good points with other people who are uncomfortable with
this.
I just see people working against improvements, I see people working
against easy know-how because it is _supposed_ to be hard, this Linux
thing.
And then they wonder why no one "likes" to write documentation. No sirs,
they actively work against it and don't believe in good documentation.
No matter if your name is Catherine Gramze and you have a PhD in
technical writing.
If you are going to insist that Linux should be hard and that novices
should have no place in it, certainly not in the command line, but
rather only in this weak distraction of a system we call KDE or Gnome,
or Unity, or whatever, ... which is not Linux and you know that.
Especially this has no bearing on Debian.
_Especially_ so I might add.
Then no small wonder that the documention is and remains bad, or rather,
inaccessible to ordinary people or to people who haven't yet spent
decades on this thing.
