On Sat, Apr 28 2012, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > On Sat, 28 Apr 2012 14:55:42 -0700, Xah Lee wrote: > >> Learn Technical Writing from Unix Man in 10 Days >> >> Quote from man apt-get: >> >> remove >> remove is identical to install except that packages are >> removed >> instead of installed. > > > Do you also expect the documentation to define "except", "instead", "is", > "to" and "the"? > > If you don't know what "install" and "remove" means, then you need an > English dictionary, not a technical manual.
It is considerably worse than that. If you look at what the documentation for apt-get actually says, instead of just the badly mangled version that Xah shares you would realize that the post was basically a bald-face troll. The rest of Xah's links in this particular article was even worse. For the most part he was criticizing documentation flaws that have disappeared years ago. Heck, his criticism of Emacs' missing documentation has been fixed since Emacs 21 (the Emacs developers are currently getting ready to release Emacs 24). His criticism of git's documentation is also grossly misleading. kernel.org still has the empty directories, but git-scm.org has been the official home for git's documentation for years. I am sure that the rest of the examples are just as ridiculous. I tend to like Xah's writing. Heck, I even sent a few bucks his way as thanks for his Emacs Lisp tutorials. However, that particular post was simply ridiculous. Jason -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
