On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 1:14 PM, Kevin Cozens via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On 16-07-17 11:59 PM, ac via talk wrote:
I guess most of us have not used man pages for so many years,
hm... that could be an interesting little survey to put up on a website. The question could be "How do you get information about a new program?". The options could be: built-in help, man, info, all of the above, man and info, or other (ie. internet search).
I use man pages all the time. I don't remember the last time I used info.
I find that man pages are most often terse with nary an example of either positive or negative outcomes. Therefore when I am trying to understand what the whatever is going wrong with something that isn't working man pages are rarely useful. Now to those that know what they are doing they seem to have just enough information so that one can then find which knob to turn or button to push so that the software does what its supposed to. For those of us who aren't computer science majors - - - well man pages are rather less than useful. I find its far more helpful to find someone's tale of how they got xyz working far more useful as then there are some examples of what to do and what to do when things go screwy (which happens all too often). Regards Dee