On Feb 7, 2009, at 4:52 AM, Neil Bothwick <n...@digimed.co.uk> wrote:
On Fri, 6 Feb 2009 14:25:07 +0000 (UTC), Grant Edwards wrote:
You'd expect to find a list of contents, chapters and an index
in a printed reference book, electronic documentation should
be no different.
Perhaps, but I think info is an awful implementation. A single
large man page is much better, and a single large html page
with links in it is far, far, better.
Info is far from a perfect solution (very far)and I generally use it
in
Konqueror anyway, but the idea that any product, no matter how
complex,
should be documented in a single, unindexed page is ridiculous.
Searching in a single page is fine, as long as the term you are
looking
for is fairly unique, try searching for something like avi in the
mplayer
man page and see how many times you need to press n before you find
what
you want.
The Gentoo handbook is an excellent example of how documentation
should
be arranged.
--
Neil Bothwick
Of all the people I've met you're certainly one of them
While I do like how the handbook is aranged, I'd much rather go
through condensed manpages if I were looking for how to do something.
The handbook is easy to read and all, and tends to provide decent
reasoning for each step it suggests, but it's far too bulky for my
taste.
