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?

Jim

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On 2025-08-23, Jim <[email protected]> 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? That is, are there man pages that big, or did your histogramization (?) arbitrarily pick 20000?

$ man txr | wc
46266 382645 2775327

No, hold it, correction. I have a wide terminal. We have to measure
using the 80 column standard:

$ MANWIDTH=80 man txr | wc
67616 386241 3110809

That's more like it!

--
TXR Programming Language: http://nongnu.org/txr
Cygnal: Cygwin Native Application Library: http://kylheku.com/cygnal
Mastodon: @[email protected]

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On 2025-08-25, Richard <[email protected]> wrote:

[Please do not mail me a copy of your followup]

Janis Papanagnou <[email protected]> spake the secret code
<108ahql$1oon3$[email protected]> thusly:

I absolutely share that feeling. - I'm not sure what the right way
would be. I fear it's something else than 'man' or 'info'.

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.

Perl showed a way that was optimized for machines that would
have struggled with huge man pages.

It's a bad way today; all in one man page, or GTFO.

All I want is to be able to type "man <thing>" and then search
for what I want in that one single wall of text.

If it's not found in the one text then I know that either what I'm
looking for doesn't exist, or my search pattern isn't the right one. I
don't have to also suspect that I might be searching using the right
pattern, but in the wrong documentation rabbit hole.

Look at the web-hosted GNU manuals. They usually have two flavors:
all-in-one giant HTML page, or sectioned. I almost always go for the all-in-one because one Ctrl-F will search the whole thing.

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On 2025-08-23 at 19:31 ADT, Keith Thompson <[email protected]> wrote:

Kaz Kylheku <[email protected]> writes:

On 2025-08-23, Jim <[email protected]> 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? That is, are there man pages that big, or did your >>> histogramization (?) arbitrarily pick 20000?

$ man txr | wc
46266 382645 2775327

No, hold it, correction. I have a wide terminal. We have to measure
using the 80 column standard:

$ MANWIDTH=80 man txr | wc
67616 386241 3110809

That's more like it!

I don't have txr on my system, but :

$ MANWIDTH=80 man ffmpeg-all 2>/dev/null | wc
49196 210446 1764012

That omits the troff "cannot break line" and "cannot adjust line"
warnings.

Over the years I've heard people complain that man pages are too terse.
Imagine if the man page for ffmpeg(-all), gcc or txr was verbose. (Maybe
the txr man page is verbose, I also don't have it on my system.)

Jim

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Janis Papanagnou <[email protected]> writes:

As I said, I never knew about nor worked with
these /usr/share/doc information; I'm curious.

On 2025-08-28, Bob Vloon <[email protected]d> wrote:

Often, one can find information there which is distributed with the original sources, think about README's and examples. Apart from that, more in-depth documentation can be found there.

That's the case on Debian, at least, with the "more in-depth" documentation often distributed in a package seperate from the package holding the binaries.

Likewise, on Fedora. Some packages have full manuals there. But ...
1) You never know what is there, or even if there is anything there for
the package you need help with.
2) There is not really a consistent mapping between package names and
folder/file names in /usr/share/doc
3) Even if it not in /usr/share/doc on your system, it may in fact be
available in your repos, but good luck figuring out what the
package is called.

So usually, it it simpler to just Google or ask on the support forum for
the distro.
--
- Lars

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Lars Poulsen <[email protected]> writes:

Janis Papanagnou <[email protected]> writes:

As I said, I never knew about nor worked with
these /usr/share/doc information; I'm curious.

On 2025-08-28, Bob Vloon <[email protected]d> wrote:

Often, one can find information there which is distributed with the original >> sources, think about README's and examples. Apart from that, more in-depth >> documentation can be found there.

That's the case on Debian, at least, with the "more in-depth" documentation >> often distributed in a package seperate from the package holding the binaries.

Likewise, on Fedora. Some packages have full manuals there. But ...
1) You never know what is there, or even if there is anything there for
the package you need help with.
2) There is not really a consistent mapping between package names and
folder/file names in /usr/share/doc
3) Even if it not in /usr/share/doc on your system, it may in fact be
available in your repos, but good luck figuring out what the
package is called.

So usually, it it simpler to just Google or ask on the support forum for
the distro.

I can imagine that, certainly. However, I'd like to address your three points individuallly, since I cannot relate t all of them :)

Ad 1) True. One has to find out by exploring. That's in a way annoying.

Ad 2) In Debian, I have to disagree. The package maintainers seem to be doing
a nice job here. For example, if I want to know something about INN2, I can refer to /usr/share/doc/inn2 - and that is the name of the package. Most of
the time (I'm introducing some uncertainty here - but that's because I'm not familiar with all packages on my system ;) ) I'm able to find the right directory.

Ad 3) I assume that you mean that the accompanying documentation cannot be found
easily? If that's what you mean, it's not true over here. E.g. the GCC docs (package "gcc") are in "gcc-doc" - which is a optional dependency of "gcc".

All in all, over the years, I've seen documentation - and the accessibility of the documentation, being improved, and that's a good thing.

As a side note, thinking about "info", the thing that annoyed be often was the indication in the man-page that the "full documentation" was in the info pages. However, when I accessed that, it turned out to be the manual page ;) Nevertheless, I'm under the impression that that improved also.

Concluding, I'm "relatively happy".

Cheers,

Bob

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