On Fri, 22 Mar 2024, American Citizen wrote:
A few years ago, I took my Linux OS which is openSuse Leap v15.3 or so and
ran a check on the documentation such as the man1 through man9 pages (run the
%man man command to pull all this up) versus the actual executables on the
system.
I was surprised to find < 15% of the command executables were documented.
Naturally I was hoping for something like 50% to 75%.
If I am going to talk to an AI program, such as ChatBot or one of the newer
popular AI program and ask it to generate the documentation for the complete
OS, what AI chatbot would you choose?
My idea is to clue the AI program into the actual OS, then ask it to finish
documenting 100% of all the executables, or report to me all executables
which have no available documentation at all, period.
I'd be interested to know your definition of "command executables." Is
it everything in /bin, /usr/bin, /sbin, and /usr/sbin, with perhaps
/usr/libexec thrown in for good measure? If not, can you provide your
criteria for inclusion?
Presumably, you ruled out all hard and symbolic links, and you
accounted for documentation in Texinfo format, not just man pages.
I have no hands-on AI experience, but I do offer couple alternative
strategies that might assist:
First, try invoking each executable with common help options: -h,
--help, -?, or even 'help' itself. If there's good output, I suspect
you could pipe it into txt2man or a similar utility to generate a
basic man page.
Second, on rpm-based systems, the package might catalog other
documentation (likely, but not necessarily, in /usr/share/doc). The
shell-ish logic to unwrap this might be something like
for PROG in /usr/bin/* /usr/sbin/*; do
# rule out symlinks, though this is debatable
if test -L $PROG; then continue; fi
# see if rpm thinks a package owns $PROG
PKG=$(rpm -qf $PROG 2>/dev/null)
# if so, do a cursory look for documentation
if test -n "$PKG"; then
rpm -qd $PKG | grep -i $PROG
fi
done
The "grep" in there might be a bit limiting, but "rpm -qd" can be
quite verbose for some packages. Season to taste.
--
Paul Heinlein
heinl...@madboa.com
45°22'48" N, 122°35'36" W
