[...]
For most GNU tools, the info document is definitive and the man page is secondary (and sometimes is only a brief summary). bash is the only exception that I know of.
[...]
On 22.08.2025 23:46, Keith Thompson wrote:
[...]
For most GNU tools, the info document is definitive and the man page is
secondary (and sometimes is only a brief summary). bash is the only
exception that I know of.
Really? - On my Linux system I get for most system commands thorough
man page information. (And I feel lucky about that situation.)
Janis
[...]
Yes. I think that for some GNU tools, the info and man documents
contain the same information. For others, the man page is just a brief summary, sometimes generated from "--help" output with "help2man".
On 23.08.2025 00:06, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
On 22.08.2025 23:46, Keith Thompson wrote:
[...]
For most GNU tools, the info document is definitive and the man page is
secondary (and sometimes is only a brief summary). bash is the only
exception that I know of.
Really? - On my Linux system I get for most system commands thorough
man page information. (And I feel lucky about that situation.)
I have to correct that; on the bottom of some man pages I see a note
"The full documentation for <tool> is maintained as a Texinfo manual."
On 2025-08-22 at 20:05 ADT, Janis Papanagnou <[email protected]> wrote:
On 23.08.2025 00:40, Keith Thompson wrote:
Yes. I think that for some GNU tools, the info and man documents
contain the same information. For others, the man page is just a brief
summary, sometimes generated from "--help" output with "help2man".
I've meanwhile looked also into the size of the man pages...
Number of man pages with number of lines
512 with 1..40 lines
1641 with 41..200 lines
781 with 201..1000 lines
159 with 1001..5000 lines
28 with 5001..20000 lines
That doesn't appear to be just irrelevant information, at least.
Is that 20000 tight?
That is, are there man pages that big, or did your
histogramization (?) arbitrarily pick 20000?
On 23.08.2025 19:08, Jim wrote:
On 2025-08-22 at 20:05 ADT, Janis Papanagnou <[email protected]> wrote:
On 23.08.2025 00:40, Keith Thompson wrote:
Yes. I think that for some GNU tools, the info and man documents
contain the same information. For others, the man page is just a brief >>>> summary, sometimes generated from "--help" output with "help2man".
I've meanwhile looked also into the size of the man pages...
Number of man pages with number of lines
512 with 1..40 lines
1641 with 41..200 lines
781 with 201..1000 lines
159 with 1001..5000 lines
28 with 5001..20000 lines
That doesn't appear to be just irrelevant information, at least.
Is that 20000 tight?
(What do you mean by "tight"?)
That is, are there man pages that big, or did your
histogramization (?) arbitrarily pick 20000?
I picked the ranges arbitrarily, starting with 40 and increasing
by factors of ~5; this looked like a reasonable choice of ranges
(I knew that the largest file was not exceeding 18000 lines).
The upper ranges of the data were (listed are amount of files
with their respective number of lines):
...
1 5143
1 5450
1 5637
1 5701
1 6159
2 8071
1 9155
1 9961
2 12239
2 13892
1 15356
4 15507
10 17484
The coincidence that there's for example 10 files with exactly
17484 lines is due to they effectively represent the same tool
and have probably the same structure or similar content.[*]
Janis
[*] For example
/usr/share/man/man1/c++.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/cc.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/g++.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/g++-4.6.1.gz
...
/usr/share/man/man1/x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc.1.gz
Perl showed the way by breaking up the documentation into multiple man
pages describing different aspects of the language, e.g. syntax,
modules, etc. and the main man page guiding into which man page you
should read for further information.
The original Unix distributions from Bell Labs took a different
approach. The man page was to serve as a concise reference for the command-line arguments, related files and so-on. If the software was
more complex, like yacc, then a user guide was expected to accompany
the program and would live in /usr/doc, not /usr/man. The user guide
was expected to be written with the ms macro package not the man macro package. However, I don't think this actually took hold culturally
anywhere except Bell Labs and the original creators of Unix.
Janis Papanagnou <[email protected]> writes:
[...]
Strangely, in the past decades, I completely missed the /usr/doc
part of the Unix documentation. (I wonder why...)
On some systems (Ubuntu in my case), it's /usr/share/doc .
[...]
You probably won't miss much by ignoring /usr/share/doc .
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