From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Jan 5 19:41:43 1999 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id TAA04925 for freebsd-questions-outgoing; Tue, 5 Jan 1999 19:41:43 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from modgud.nordicdms.com (h21-168-107.nordicdms.com [207.21.168.107]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA04920 for ; Tue, 5 Jan 1999 19:41:42 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from walton@nordicdms.com) Received: (qmail 19598 invoked by alias); 6 Jan 1999 03:41:14 -0000 Message-ID: <19990106034114.19595.qmail@modgud.nordicdms.com> Received: (qmail 19579 invoked from network); 6 Jan 1999 03:41:14 -0000 Received: from mail-ftp.nordicdms.com (HELO mail-ftp) (207.21.168.100) by mail.nordicdms.com with SMTP; 6 Jan 1999 03:41:14 -0000 From: "Dave Walton" Organization: Nordic Entertainment Worldwide To: Graeme Tait , questions@FreeBSD.ORG, grog@lemis.com Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1999 19:41:13 -0800 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: Printed man pages (was: Looking for the best webmaster.) Reply-to: walton@nordicdms.com In-reply-to: <3692CFEE.3AA5@echidna.com> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.01d) Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 5 Jan 99, at 21:52, Graeme Tait wrote: > Greg Lehey wrote: > > The general consensus is that the man pages are a waste of space, and > > they make the book too heavy. The next edition won't have them. If > > anybody has strong feelings about this, please let me know. > > OTOH, I recognize that they make the book unmanageable. I'd rather have > more handbook text, without the man pages - except, I think it might be > good to retain man pages for a selected few commands, like disklabel and > newfs for instance, for those occasions when you don't have a system > with which to see the online versions. I have to second this thought. In general, the man pages section is nice, but not essential. It certainly wouldn't hurt to trim it down a lot, but I think getting rid of it completely is going a tiny bit too far. What I'd like to see is the "Selected man pages" section turn into "Essential man pages". That is, man pages for the commands you need when you find yourself poking around in single user mode trying to figure out ed enough to fix things. Yes, there have been a couple of times I would have killed for a printed ed man page -- please put that one on the list! And, as Graeme points out, disklabel and newfs are good candidates, too. Dave ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Dave Walton Webmaster, Postmaster Nordic Entertainment Worldwide walton@nordicdms.com http://www.nordicdms.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message