[haiku] Re: Man



On Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:56:44 +0200, Fredrik Holmqvist
<fredrik.holmqvist@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 2010/8/30 Alex von Gluck <kallisti5@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
>> 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
> 
> But it doesn't even support images, and sometimes it is good to force
> documentation to move to newer formats that support images, audio,
> video, interaction and other things that users expect these days.
> 
> If you ask me it is time to make that move.

>Why do you need images, audio, and video to document text-based
>applications?  



You definitely would not want to type man and get images and audio. What Alex 
is describing 
is a media rich wiki environment, something made and displayed with HTML. I see 
man and wiki 
as both cool but separate domains. I would be happy if man had only a list of 
system calls, parameters,
and which libs needed to link them. The size of man + man pages would be fairly 
small. Man would be used
mostly be developers for quick lookups. This kind of developer knowledge would 
be used for developers, who
are more experienced, and do not need the rich media.
- Andrew

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