Re: Man pages missing

[Zefram <zefram@dcs.warwick.ac.uk>]

Vidiot wrote:
>I commented to RC separately about the documentation.  Personally I think
>the man pages and the manual should be separated.  The man pages should be
>very brief, to the point that the zsh man page could be only a couple of
>pages long.

No!  man pages are the primary form of online documentation for Unix
programs; they *must* have complete information.  I regularly look
things up in the man page, and would be severely inconvenienced if I
had to log in to a graphical terminal and fire up ghostview (or
whatever) to get authoritative information.

(Nor would I want to print out the manual.  That would cost me money,
and waste paper, and be less convenient than online documentation, and
it would be difficult to keep up with each new release.)

>The main manual should be done using a package like Framemaker, which would
>allow for easier WYSIWYG editing and formatting.

Ease of editing is not really a significant consideration for most of
us, I suspect.  I've never yet seen a WYSIWYG system that was as good
as the WYGIWYG systems running on the same computers.

>                           Zsh needs a decent manual.  What we have now
>are the man pages without the nroff/man-page-looking-format.

And what do you have against man pages?

-zefram