On Mon, 2008-12-01 at 09:28 +0100, Matej Cepl wrote: > On 2008-12-01, 01:45 GMT, Michael Cronenworth wrote: > > Man pages, while informative, are limited. If examples or > > detailed information are required then you're back to Google > > searching. > > Yes, there are many manpages which are pretty bad. But expanding > content won't happen by switching to different format, but fixing > each manpage. Yes, one at the time. > > > Two hours? I should hope to create something in 10 minutes. > > Two hours include learning curve. After writing one manpage and > learning how to do it, including collecting appropriate tools, it > should be as fast as writing with anything else. I don't think > that two hours of learning is too high price for creating > structured, long-lasting documentation. > > Best, > > Matěj > I've never written a man page or much documentation myself, but I think this is a great area where non-programmers (or at least, those that don't know the languages that are used inside of Fedora & other free operating systems) can contribute back to the project. If someone could setup a SIG for man page conversion or just leverage the documentation team and make a focus on teaching how to do man pages, I could see this bits of this task being chipped away significantly on the road to F11. I know that I'm definitely leaning towards the idea of writing one or two man pages, because I've run into the missing-man-page problem too often. Here's a suggested action plan (forgive me if I am out of place for suggesting it): 1) Identify which packages are missing man pages altogether in Fedora -- these should get top priority -- we can see if Debian or other projects already have some -- acceptable-licensing-pending, of course 2) Identify which packages having sub-par man pages -- after fulfilling 1), this should be the next priority -- similar methodology to 1), find ones that already exist first 3) Develop a "stub" template for packages that have no man pages available -- at least we can include command-line arguments, authorship, web links for more info, etc. -- at first this isn't much better than -h/--help, but we can at least let it be a start 4) Once we have all of this information prepared, then we can get to work on forming a project around this group, preparing a page in the wiki with the packages that need man pages or whose man pages need improvement, etc. 5) ??? 6) Profit! How does that sound? -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
