[Om2008.9] man pages??? && killing events/0

[Sarton O'Brien]

On Monday 20 October 2008 18:57:21 Matthias Apitz wrote:
> El día Monday, October 20, 2008 a las 06:45:26PM +1100, Alex Osborne 
escribió:
> > Well of course it's going to be different on FreeBSD -- different kernel
> > -- but the location of the CPU time in /proc is going to be the same as
> > any other system running the Linux kernel (well at least any that's not
> > completely ancient anyway).  So the simplest option, as I was suggesting
> > is just to consult the proc manpage on any random Linux PC and if you
> > don't have a Linux box handy then Google it, as people have put most of
> > the man pages online.
> >
> > > for example where is the man page
> > > of 'dropbear'?
> >
> > http://www.google.com/search?q=dropbear+manpage
> >
> > First result:
> >
> > http://downloads.openwrt.org/people/nico/man/man8/dropbear.8.html
> >
> > ;-)
>
> I thing Linux/UNIX goes the wrong way if we depend on Google to lookup
> man pages;

Errr ... I've seen plenty of windows programs that don't come with 
documentation or relatively useless documention. Can't say the help facility 
is all that helpful either.

You were asking for documentation for _technically_ a 3rd party program 
included on an embedded system. It makes sense to consult the website of the 
software or (heaven forbid) search for the man page. Last resort would be to 
install/extract the software on a system where you can read the documentation, 
which seems to be your preferred option.

I don't think the suggestion was "google is our documentation" but merely 
that, if you bothered to search, you wouldn't have to bother us to search for 
you.

> > Seriously though, if you must have the absolute exact same version for
> > some reason and don't have a Linux box, just grab the source tarball:
> >
> > wget http://downloads.openmoko.org/sources/dropbear-0.51.tar.bz2
> > tar -jxvf dropbear-0.51.tar.bz2
> > cd dropbear-0.51
> > man ./dropbear.8
>
> Now we're getting closer; thanks for the hint; maybe it would be a good
> idea if we have *all* man pages installed at
> http://downloads.openmoko.org/
> or even as a fetch-able tar ball; in KDE you can just put 'man:ssh' into
> the KDE's browser Konqueror and you get what you want;

Fair enough, but it's like expecting microsoft to host all the documentation 
for all the apps that you could _possibly_ install on their OS. As nice as 
that might be, it's not exactly realistic.

Nearly any decent linux distro project has htmlised their man pages and from 
experience, reinventing the wheel can only ever have 'so much' benefit.

The definitive place for any documentation will always be the source. Anything 
else could quite possibly be outdated. Possibly automated links to the 
official software source files/homepages would be more appropriate.

The kernel itself is a different matter but once again, plenty of wheels are 
out there.

> > Usually manpages aren't installed on embedded systems in the interests
> > of saving space.
>
> Of course and I was not expecting the man pages installed on the
> FR.

So searching the wiki and searching google are not akin? There seems to be a 
location dependency going on with your logic, I would have thought search 
relevance was what was important here and how quickly you can obtain the 
information you require.

Seriously, this is the situation with embedded systems and I doubt any project 
can warrant the time for maintaining a man digest vs development. It's really 
not as much of an issue as you make it appear.

Sarton