Re: ZSH presence on WWW cf. Perl

[Peter Stephenson <pws@hydra.ifh.de>]

bas@astro.uva.nl wrote:
> "Richard J Coleman" <coleman@math.gatech.edu> writes:
> 
> > I agree that nroff is terrible.  I've been thinking maybe it's time
> > to scrap man pages altogether.  Put all the documentation into a
> > latex file, and create a nice zsh manual.
> 
> I like to have documentation on-line as well.  But every time I
> proposed keeping only the texinfo file, there were loud protests from
> various people.  I don't remember exactly why, probably because they
> had nothing to read info with.

One of the things I hate about systems that other people have set up
is finding there's no detailed documentation for (say) elm because the
only thing that got installed was a minimal manual page which points
you somewhere else, which might be on the machine in the directory
/usr/local/.hidden/.even_more_hidden/doc/dunno_where_to_put_this/elm
but might not be.  Only ordinary manual pages have a reasonable
probability of being installed by the average system administrator,
who has typically got better things to do than create new directory
structures for non-standard manual formats.  Even if you arrange for
info files to be installed automatically you have to rely on the
administrator not only providing an info reader but also changing the
`dir' file or even writing a new one --- although a decent script
should be able to handle this.

On the other hand, nroff is the worst format I can think of for a
standard.  It would be much better to have something which converts
easily into nroff.  I don't know of anything reliable and powerful
enough at the moment.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@ifh.de>       Tel: +49 33762 77366
WWW:  http://www.ifh.de/~pws/       Fax: +49 33762 77330
Deutches Electronen-Synchrotron --- Institut fuer Hochenergiephysik Zeuthen
DESY-IfH, 15735 Zeuthen, Germany.