bugDatabase-driven manual pager suite - Bugs: bug #53050, `man man' documentation

 
 

bug #53050: `man man' documentation

Submitter:  Karlsson vomdach <kalle>
Submitted:  Fri 02 Feb 2018 10:04:27 PM UTC
   
 
Category:  None Severity:  3 - Normal
Item Group:  None Status:  Fixed
Privacy:  Public Assigned to:  cjwatson
Open/Closed:  Closed
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Wed 23 Oct 2019 12:01:21 PM UTC, comment #3: 

Fixed in man-db 2.9.0.

Colin Watson <cjwatson>
Group administrator
Sun 08 Sep 2019 02:05:50 PM UTC, comment #2: 
Colin Watson <cjwatson>
Group administrator
Sat 03 Feb 2018 03:25:43 PM UTC, comment #1: 

Thanks for your comments.  (I might have noticed your email if you hadn't used my email address as your subject line, which made it look like spam!  But in any case filing a bug is better than emailing me directly.)

In general, I'll consider these after the 2.8.0 release, since they'll be quite disruptive to the existing translations of that page.

I disagree with your premise that 'info' is friendlier to new users; I've seen very many people unfamiliar with Unix being completely and utterly lost when pointed at 'info' (although part of this is due to the standard frontend having a somewhat idiosyncratic UI).  However, it's often true that 'info' provides a different kind of documentation (discursive rather than reference), and I'd be willing to add a cross-reference to it in those terms.

Colin Watson <cjwatson>
Group administrator
Fri 02 Feb 2018 10:04:27 PM UTC, original submission:  

I already sent this mail on 16.12.17 to cjwatson AT debian.org but got no answer. So here I try again.

"
hello,

here some comments from me on the page `man man':
Generally I think that this page should be more user-friendly since it
can be an accesspoint for new users to their system and its
documentation, if for example they know no commands but only that there
exists the `man'-documentation.

- the synopsis could be made more overviewable, e.g. that it would also
be shown in the form "man -k [options] PATTERN" rather than writing all
the options out. Specially, since `man man' should be more newbie-friendly.
- refer to the `info' documentation system, which is
newbie-friendlier,for example by writing it in the "SEE ALSO"-section
-`index-database-cache' isn't a user friendly term. a short explanation
should be done or referenced to some
-explain better, what `cache consistency' means
- it is not explained or referenced to what `cat'-pages are

greetings,
kalle
"

Furthermore, I would appreciate a short explanation in `man man' about where do the manpages come from, how they are installed, who writes and improves the manpage of a given program …

Karlsson vomdach <kalle>

 

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    Follow 5 latest changes.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2019-10-23 cjwatson StatusReady For Test Fixed
        Open/ClosedOpen Closed
    2019-09-08 cjwatson StatusNone Ready For Test
        Assigned toNone cjwatson
    2018-02-02 kalle Carbon-Copy- Added -email is unavailable-

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