Re: Re[2]: [newbie] Rant: The man pages
On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 13:49, rikona wrote: Hello Aron, Tuesday, September 23, 2003, 3:25:39 AM, you wrote: AS RTFM OK but the real newbie is having trouble finding TFM Gee - I thought I was the only one with that problem. :-) Took me six months to figure out that when a browser opened that you could backstep a littlebit and get to the Documentation ;-0 Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: Re[2]: [newbie] Rant: The man pages
On Sunday 21 Sep 2003 9:03 pm, rikona wrote: Hello Richard, Sunday, September 21, 2003, 3:03:45 AM, you wrote: RU apropos doesn't work because the man pages call it y. Yep - another part of the problem. M$ help suffers from the same problem, although their overall integration of help is a step in the right direction. Newbies can describe the question in 'natural language', which is unfortunately not the language used in the OS data base. The first OS that uses a thesaurus well will really be a winner. I'm hoping that will be Mandrake. How can we do that? MS help suffers from contextual help disease: tech writers are given a list of every menu entry and dialog and think that by documenting all of these their job is done. You end up with the man problem again; no howto. -- Richard Urwin Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: Re[2]: [newbie] Rant: The man pages
On Sun, 2003-09-21 at 22:57, rikona wrote: Hello yankl, Sunday, September 21, 2003, 5:36:27 PM, you wrote: y hence the end of my e-mail man -k. Have any one done their home y work? Yes, but it was not very helpful, as I mentioned. y By typing #man -k lilo one can see what command it relates too. Aha - now we can actually see the un-natural language needed to get the answer. The page number is 'lilo', and we still have to keep the -k. :-) y Unless we like to have m$users we need to start using all tools y provided by OS. There are a ton of tools, that is not the problem. The problem is being able to find the right answer in this sea of tools. y In my opinion the order of trying to solve something in the *nix y should be as following: y 1. HOWTO (tldp.org or build in) Often a good place to start, but it is still too 'command' oriented, rather than 'problem' oriented. y 2. man page y 3. google.com y 4. newbie list I like 4, 3, and then 2 best. But then I'm a newbie. :-) I can fully understand why someone who already knows it would prefer the other order. y If one will not try to figure out staff by him/herself we will have to switch y to m$ like OS where it is one way to do it and its full of holes because it y is more important to make it ease then to make it safe. Being safe and being easy to use, at least with respect to documentation, are unrelated. Better, problem-oriented documentation for linux might even make it easier to use than M$, especially if it is good-thesaurus, natural language based. Note that M$ is investing VERY heavily in people who do NL work. Hint, hint. If you want Mandrake to take off, this will be a key - there are just not enough geeks. :-))) Of course, there's the crowd that does NOT want it to take off - but that's another topic. y teach man how to resource and he will nether go back to m$. If the resources are too hard to use, he will go back to M$ anyway. No amount of RTFM put-downs will change that - indeed, it will just accelerate it. I think that the MAN pages are a holdover from the unix days and should be rewritten possibly with examples Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: Re[2]: [newbie] Rant: The man pages
On Mon, 2003-09-22 at 03:47, Aron Smith wrote: On Sun, 2003-09-21 at 22:57, rikona wrote: Hello yankl, Sunday, September 21, 2003, 5:36:27 PM, you wrote: y hence the end of my e-mail man -k. Have any one done their home y work? Yes, but it was not very helpful, as I mentioned. y By typing #man -k lilo one can see what command it relates too. Aha - now we can actually see the un-natural language needed to get the answer. The page number is 'lilo', and we still have to keep the -k. :-) y Unless we like to have m$users we need to start using all tools y provided by OS. There are a ton of tools, that is not the problem. The problem is being able to find the right answer in this sea of tools. y In my opinion the order of trying to solve something in the *nix y should be as following: y 1. HOWTO (tldp.org or build in) Often a good place to start, but it is still too 'command' oriented, rather than 'problem' oriented. y 2. man page y 3. google.com y 4. newbie list I like 4, 3, and then 2 best. But then I'm a newbie. :-) I can fully understand why someone who already knows it would prefer the other order. y If one will not try to figure out staff by him/herself we will have to switch y to m$ like OS where it is one way to do it and its full of holes because it y is more important to make it ease then to make it safe. Being safe and being easy to use, at least with respect to documentation, are unrelated. Better, problem-oriented documentation for linux might even make it easier to use than M$, especially if it is good-thesaurus, natural language based. Note that M$ is investing VERY heavily in people who do NL work. Hint, hint. If you want Mandrake to take off, this will be a key - there are just not enough geeks. :-))) Of course, there's the crowd that does NOT want it to take off - but that's another topic. y teach man how to resource and he will nether go back to m$. If the resources are too hard to use, he will go back to M$ anyway. No amount of RTFM put-downs will change that - indeed, it will just accelerate it. I think that the MAN pages are a holdover from the unix days and should be rewritten possibly with examples I think the newbie twiki should/could and will be the manpages, rewritten so that a simpler search engine (htdig?,, google) and simpler computer users can understand what is being said. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
