[Info-vax] Radical command line suggestion

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On Wed, 18 Mar 2015 14:29:01 -0700 (PDT)
mcleanjoh--- via Info-vax <info-vax at rbnsn.com> wrote:

> On Thursday, March 19, 2015 at 6:55:52 AM UTC+11, John Reagan wrote:
> > On Wednesday, March 18, 2015 at 11:56:47 AM UTC-4, Bob Koehler wrote:
> > > In article <f26e8302-e3f9-4fd9-bb73-9501fe886115 at googlegroups.com>,
> > > johnwall+++ at yahoo.co.uk writes:
> > > > 
> > > > man and info may have advantages (vs HELP) as tools for navigation.
> > > > Maybe HELP needs an update then?
> > > 
> > >    man has advantages?  On what planet?  man is the worst thing I've
> > >    ever used, and is only barely tolerable if the X10 based xman gui
> > >    is used instead of the terminal window man.
> > > 
> > >    How many times did I have to re-rad vast sections of the ksh man
> > >    page when a lower paragraph pointed to an earlier entity.
> > > 
> > >    ARGHHHHHHHH.
> > 
> > Uh, the man on my systems has an emacs-like command set that lets me
> > page forward, page backwards, search for things, etc.
> 
> ... and man often contains examples, makes recommendations against using
> deprecated unsafe code and has cross-referencing.

But this is not about the man format, it's about content. I like VMS HELP,
I get along ok with man. If HELP would add paging and searching and the
content could be updated I don't think HELP itself has to be replaced.

> Because Linux has been created from software developer input 'man' often
> has entries for routines that tie together a bunch of low level routines,
> eg. one routine to create a pair of pipes (aka mailboxes) for
> interprocess comms.  On this basis new things get added to 'man' as new
> routines are supplied in Linux.

Perhaps. But because Linux is free as in pennies on the sidewalk the doc is
all over the place. Some of it is excellent. A fair amount of it is ok
(when it exists!) and a lot of it is simply absent from man and is found in
the README files for apps or /usr/share/doc/application-name. Lack of doc
and doc quality problems are common in Linux, less so in commercial UNIX.
That doesn't make man bad or good. man is ok for what it is.

> As Simon (I think it was) said here a few months ago, Help is more often
> just 'help with syntax'.  If you are not sure what qualifier to use you
> might need to guess and then look at two or three Help 'pages' rather
> than see a one or two line summary of what each qualifier is about.

Yeah but that has nothing to do with HELP. It has to do with HELP content.
You can change the content and add a few niceties like paging and searching
without throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

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