Comment by coldtea
8 years ago
>You clearly don't understand core Unix philosophy[1].
That's because it's trite cargo cult. And even worse, it's totally unapplicable to our discussion, as it pertains to program design, not how to write or what to include in a man page. man, the program, would still just be a simple manpage showing program.
Besides it, and other basic unix core utils and userland programs, have adopted 10,000s of flags and new functionality over the years, to the point that shooting down my --examples suggestion for "breaking the unix philosophy" is total BS.
Heck, Emacs includes everything AND the kitchen sync, but it's a much beloved part of Unix tradition.
>It's this that drives commands like man, that have been around since 3rd edition Unix.
Tradition doesn't make it right. Where's the science? How about some actual measurements of levels of head-banging of users between different approaches?
Also note that I started on Sun OS, when Solaris was a new unstable OS, and have used HPUX, IRIX and other such flavors in workstations of the time (and actual VT terminals). I'm not some teenager that got into Linux with the latest Ubuntu.
>The problem is that you want man pages to do something they aren't designed for, and will not change to.
Sorry, you've already lost that battle. Lots of manpages already have EXAMPLES sections. It's just that not enough attention has been paid to their content.
> it's totally unapplicable to our discussion
Wait, we're talking about the Unix man command, and you're saying that the fundamental philosophy upon which this command's entire design and purpose is based is somehow unapplicable? Really?
> but it's [EMACS] a much beloved part of Unix tradition.
No. EMACS is not part of the Unix tradition. EMACS was invented before Unix at MIT. Unix was invented at Bell Labs. EMACS was designed for an OS called ITS as a successor to the TECO editor (developed in 1962). You're getting mixed up with vi, which was created for Unix by Bill Joy in the 70s as a separate mode for ex, which was a successor to ed.
You're possibly thinking of GNU EMACS, which would be ironic, considering that GNU is an acronym that stands for "GNU's Not UNIX".
The Operating Systems you or I have used aren't really relevant to the discussion. I can see that you may have filled in context that wasn't there and assumed I'm some old unix beard telling you to get off my lawn. That's not the case.
I have two points:
1. Man exists because of specific documented conventions. Man pages are the way they are because they're expected to follow conventions built over the past 40 years.
2. There are places that howto documentation belongs in most Unix-derived OSes, certainly for anything BSD derived and anything following the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.
Take a step back and try to see what I'm seeing. I see someone who seems to insist that we should change a specific 40+ year old convention to suit environments that implement other 40+ year old conventions, when there's already a place for the things they want (again thanks to explicit and implicit convention and documentation). It's not going to happen.
You are not going to get Apple, Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu and the BSDs to change the way they've done things forever to suit your whims. You're also definitely not going to get them to change them when perfectly functional alternatives already exist.