Re: Again?: Mouse in console

[Chris Zakelj <c.zakelj@ieee.org>]

Mark Farquaad wrote:

>have no work, and maybe they only have windows or some
>other OS without CVS or "man patch" there.
>  
>
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi
(both those links are on the front page)

>And I'm sure he's too humble to ask for a change in 
>documentation genaration that would give him more
>manpower / hands.
>
Or maybe he likes the system the way it is, because it guarantees 
consistency and quality.  Too many cooks gives you 
RH/SuSE/Mandrake/Slackware/Debian/Gentoo/YellowDog/Tiny/MyBrainHurts, 
and we all know how good those docs are.

>You can list them one after the other, perhaps in alphabetical
>order, but you can never take advantage of the structures a 
>book gives with chapters etc. in man pages.
>  
>
Look at /usr/share/man (assuming you installed man36.tgz).  I'm no 
codemonkey, but I doubt it would be hard to whip up a script to go 
through them and print the whole thing.  Oh, and I found that in less 
than a minute simply by thinking to myself "When I installed xxx, it 
told me the docs lived in /usr/share/doc/xxx.  I'll bet the man pages 
are nearby!"

>The biggest disadvantage of man pages for documentation
>(especially for newbies) is:
>You practically already have to know the answer, you must
>know which command is in question, you might just not
>be sure of some arguements or similar.
>  
>
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi (with the 'apropos' radio button 
clicked)

>With chapters you can actually name the solutions, the
>names of commands and files needed to achive things, you
>don't already have to know them from previous UNIX or even 
>OpenBSD experience and usage.
>  
>
The man pages are already organized into chapters, but since you've read 
man's manpage, you already knew that.

Look, I have a *lot* more patience than most of the guys here, and *I'm* 
getting tired of reading your rants.  I learned how to do my homework, 
and found that more often than not, the answer is there, written in a 
way that my giraffe-self can understand.  Maybe I had a head-start since 
my programming classes were on a Sun boxen, but I kinda doubt it.  Now 
before you find more and more people black-holing your address, sit 
back, enjoy an email vacation, and maybe take a UNIX class at your local 
community college.  At the very least, pick up a copies of 'Absolute 
OpenBSD' and "UNIX for Dummies".