Hi Branden, On 1/5/23 13:35, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
Hi Alex, At 2023-01-05T13:03:01+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:On 1/4/23 21:04, G. Branden Robinson wrote:Official GNU resistance to man pages is broad and deep, but not universal.Is there still resistance apart from written?This is hard to me to judge, but I also interpret unorthodox man page typography as constitutive of resistance. I credit Albert Cahalan with giving me a formative experience in reading a man page that was written with resentment.[1]
Heh! That one definitely counts as resistance.
Countless thousands of Debian ps(1) page readers, often under stress trying to figure out how to identify and kill a rogue process, attempted self-help and found themselves served a dinner plate of steaming documentary hostility, innocent bystanders caught up in a pointless vendetta against a text formatting language.
Thew current page is better, but the command is so huge that I'll die before knowing how to use it more than the couple of options I normally use.
When Mr. Cahalan passes, I hope his family has the funds to engrave the first comment block from his ps(1) rewrite on his headstone.
It would be ironic if they indented anything in his headstone :)
Most contributors to GNU today seem to use man pages. There are still a few projects, like make(1) which would be better with manual pages documenting the language, but most have useful manual pages, don't they?GNU programs whose manuals have Invariant Sections or Cover Texts under the FDL tend also to lack freely-licensed man pages. Fortunately groff doesn't have this problem, because it's all dual-licensed GPL.Maybe Debian helped get there.I'd like to think so. I was around when Debian still took a lot of crap for adopting that stance. Now it has users who weren't born yet when that policy decision was made. If you don't have further comments on v2 I'll make a few more changes to v3 and submit it.
Please submit it. We'll see. Cheers, Alex
Regards, Branden [1] https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/blob/7ac9a0e1f5606696dc799b773d5ec70183ca91a3/ps/ps.1
-- <http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
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