Re: man

[Farkas Levente <lfarkas at mindmaker dot hu>]

On Fri, 30 Jun 2000, Phil Edwards wrote:
> > > This is certainly true! I'd love to see them. I don't have time to
> > > organize this effort though, so it's up to y'all... I would definitely
> > > work with whowever picks this up to include them in the standard distro.
> >
> > why not include the sgi's html documentation first ?
> > it's a big part of the work and it's free. than it'd be easier to
> > extend. on the other hand I think it's a real good documentation.
> 
> The current tips/tricks/reminders/howtos/FAQ has links to (and into) SGI's
> documentation for exactly that reason; it's well-written and quite extensive.
> That fact that it /is/ so extensive is why I've been only putting examples
> and gotchas and so forth in our own HTML stuff; no sense in reinventing
> the wheel (even if the spokes are prettier :-).
> 
> Bundling up their pages as part of libstdc++-v3 makes me skittish for a
> few reasons, though.
> 
>   1)  It's free, but is rebundling it legal?  I haven't checked.
> 
>   2)  We'd forever be playing catch-up, as we get their docs, modify them
>       to remove all the SGI extensions and bring them into line with what
>       we're actually doing.  Then we'll get people reading one set of HTML
>       files when they should have been reading the other one.  And by the
>       time it's all sorted out, SGI will make a new release.  :-)

this's not a real reason, since the same thing have to do with the library
itself:-)
 
>   3)  People -- like you and like me -- expect man pages to be available
>       for a standard compiler library.  Shipping HTML docs that they
>       already have access to only delays the problem.

no. I expect two things. first something sgi's html pages about the
standard library, second the or at least some minimal documentation about
the extensions and not just about sgi's extension, but files like
type_traits.h and *concepts* which is not in the standard (yet) but very
useful and without any documentation the only way to find this to read
ALL header files. may be some of us like it (eg. me) but it's much slower
and many "programmer" don't like it and won't do it. man pages JUST for
the standard library is not very interesting for me (I've got the
stroustup book:-) and I think it's easier to navigate in sgi's html doc.
 
 -- Levente
 "The only thing worse than not knowing the truth is
  ruining the bliss of ignorance."