[haiku] Re: Man
- From: Alex von Gluck <kallisti5@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2010 15:29:23 -0500
On Mon, 30 Aug 2010 09:42:41 +0200, Christoph Thompson
<cjsthompson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Well, pipes are nice and all. But most people do not use them because
they use Windows, and they can do everything they need to without having to
resort to a single piped command.
There is one fatal flaw in this logic, it's safe to assume on average most
parties interested in Haiku now and in the future will be coming with at
least a basic knowledge of the Linux/BSD world. Generally straight Windows
users that have never looked into Linux or BSD won't know or care about
Haiku.
Keep in mind also that Mac folks may also be future Haiku users... and
last time I checked... OS X was based on UNIX (err Darwin, close enough).
What are examples for using ifconfig?, How do you use dd? How to you use
installoptionalpackage? For command line applications, using man is way
simpler. I really don't want to pull up a web browser, open the
documentation, and perform some Javascript search for 100 references to the
command in question... I'd rather just ' man ifconfig ', 'man dd', 'man
installoptionalpacakge'.
While Haiku is designed to present the end user with a pretty and
functional UI, you can't ignore that it is compiled with GCC and offers the
powerful bash shell environment.
One final argument for including man:
alex@HOUXX:~$ ls -alh /usr/bin/man
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 161K 2010-03-02 04:31 /usr/bin/man
Is it really worth it to lose an application which is de-facto standard
on bash environments to save 160K?
160K is well below the famous bill gates quote circa 1981 "640k should
be more than enough (memory) for anybody." :)
--Alex
http://unixzen.com
Other related posts:
