Re: [Groff] man pages (tangential to Future Redux)

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Doug,

> > Man pages are not tutorials or complete manuals
> 
> As Federico said, they absolutely should be complete.

That might have been me, I certainly think they should be.

> Perhaps Gnu's most egregious contribution to Unix was to turn texinfo
> with its paleolithic interface into the "complete" documentation with
> man pages as stubs.

Yep.

> Ralph wrote:
> > There was _The Unix Programming Environment_ which, coming from K&R,
> > was how I learnt Unix existed.
> 
> A quibble: that book is Kernighan and Pike, not Kernighan and Ritchie.

Yes, sorry, I knew that.  My meaning was I'd read K&R, as in _The C
Programming Language_, learnt Unix existed due to it, and then read _The
Unix Programming Environment_.  I garbled.

> It is indeed a good book--topped Amazon's daily best-seller list when
> it first came out.

An impressive feat indeed in 1984.  :-)  I still recommend it to folks
that want to understand the underlying philosophy of Unix, now obscured
by the many layers and deviations of modern desktops and systemd(1).

Aside:  It's a shame cm.bell-labs.com seems down so much of the time
these days.  I used to prod Geoff Collyer and he'd fix it but Geoff's
own domain seems ill these days.  I might try Russ Cox and see if he
knows the current situation.

Cheers, Ralph.