Date: Wed, 06 Jan 1999 14:13:48 +0000 From: Mark Ovens <marko@uk.radan.com> To: grog@lemis.com Cc: walton@nordicdms.com, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Re: Printed man pages (was: Looking for the best webmaster.) Message-ID: <36936F9C.33BAFF88@uk.radan.com>
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Dave Walton wrote: > > 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. What plans do you have for the next edition, Greg?. Timescales, changes etc? > > > 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. > I'll third that > 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. > Might also be worth considering including some of the very long ones. As someone else pointed out, long manpages are easier to read in printed format, fvwm is one that springs to mind, although too many of these wouldn't result in a much reduced size of book, so you would have to be selective. > 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 -- Trust the computer industry to shorten Year 2000 to Y2K. It was this thinking that caused the problem in the first place. Mark Ovens, CNC Applications Engineer, Radan Computational Ltd. Bath, Avon, England. Sheet Metal CAD/CAM Solutions mailto:marko@uk.radan.com http://www.radan.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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