Camilo Mesias wrote:
2008/12/1 Les Mikesell <lesmikesell gmail com>:Adding a few examples won't hurt, but man pages are not the place for conceptual fluff. We need some other format to hold an overview of why you should use each program and how various program can be combined to accomplish different results. Man pages should just contain a reference for that program's use, because you won't look there until you already know why you want to run it.Don't forget you can have manpages for conceptual fluff (try man selinux / which selinux), and you can find out what command you need to do using 'apropos'. Example: apropos security
But I would never have thought to use 'man' on a meta-package name, so that's only useful after some user training (or the tutorial where such information really belongs anyway). And 'apropos security' should probably list every program with any security related aspect. That is, if it worked like it should, there would be too many results to be useful.
The man system really has been round the block a few times...
And it only really worked when it was accompanied by a separate tutorial and overview and the list of programs was small enough to browse with xman or search with 'man -k'. The pages themselves are generally fine once you get to the point of wanting refernce details, but now that there are many thousands of choices you need to know where to start.
-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell gmail com