On Mon, 25 Nov 2024 at 22:22, Zachary Santer <zsan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 25, 2024 at 5:07 AM Martin D Kealey <mar...@kurahaupo.gen.nz> > wrote: > > > > How about this for a concrete proposal: let's split the current man page > > into a page per topic. The following list is alphabetical, though I > should > > probably put it in some kind of narrative order. > > > > [...] > > You mostly just reinvented 'info bash' there. > Agreed. I mostly modelled it on "man perl", but the outcome is much the same. Having to maintain multiple documents seems like a waste of effort, as well as an additional source of frustration. Is there any existing tool that can convert info pages into separate man pages, with mutual references? If not, would it be worthwhile to build one? Or should we just ditch the man page entirely? (I'm sure that would hurt on systems that don't have ‘info’ installed.) Should we just ditch both, and maintain the cheat-sheet+manual+tutorial online? If so, where? manual.bash.gnu.org? People can write bad code in any language. > Yeah, that includes English, apparently. The problem is that the Shell makes it hard to write good code and easy to write bad code. (“No programmer would ever be lazy.” Yeah, right. I ran a tutorial on Bash at the 2015 LCA in Auckland, and was abashed (pun intended) to be informed that one of my example scripts didn't run correctly on some of the delegates' systems, and it turned out that I'd missed some quotes. Nobody is completely immune to this.) You can always contribute to https://mywiki.wooledge.org/ > Thanks for the reminder; I've been meaning to do that. -Martin
