Quote:
Originally Posted by scottro
With third party programs, it's hit and miss. The fluxbox man page is an example, in my mind, of how (and WHO) should write them. The writer is enthusiastic about the program and WANTS you to understand how to use it--it's full of comments like, "With fluxbox, this is easy!" Then shows you how to do it.
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Yes, exactly! It's about the attitude of the writer and if he (or she) tries to imagine what someone else might is looking for when using a certain program for the first time. If both aspects come together, the man page has a good chance of being perfect.
Quote:
Originally Posted by scottro
The BSD pages might not always be clearer than the Linux ones, but they are far more likely to have an EXAMPLES section, which is the most important. Plus, things ARE documented, even if it's not clear.  For example, the RedHat based systems start about 40 programs by default. Many are not documented, or if they are, not to the point where you can really understand if they're necessary or not. Everything in BSD's /etc/rc.d/ and the defaults are documented to a point at least. |
Just a personal experience that can not be generalized: I startet with Linux in 2002 and tried out SuSe (8.0 or 8.2). I didn't used it very long and switched about one year later to Debian which is still my favorite distribution. In these first years I never used the man pages, because I didn't understood them
. I left them behind, thinking "just for experts" and was very happy about maillists and forums where I could ask my (silly) questions. So, because of my first negative impressions I stopped using man pages for some years - and I have to admit that I never missed them.
Nowadays I look them up much more often, because now I'm using OpenBSD alongside Debian, and - as some of you know - it's no good idea asking a question on an OpenBSD forum or mailinglist without having checked the FAQ and the man pages before
.
In short: If the "first contact" fails, a lot of unexperienced users are lost for the man pages.
Quote:
Originally Posted by scottro
Once again, compliments on your English. What country are you from? I had no idea you weren't a native English speaker. (By the way, the "to" of nihonto should probably be tou, it's a long o, and would be written, in Japanese phonetics, as tou.) |
Thanks for the flowers
! Think I should mail your posting to my old English teacher. I'm from Germany - and I know that my knowledge of english grammar could be improved
.
Concerning "nihonto" - I know that it's a long "o" at the end of the word. But up to now, I've always seen this way to write it:
... and my qwertz-keyboard knows our funny german "umlaute" (äüö), but no "ō"
.