Man Pages Thoughts

[Bill Moran]

Tom Rhodes <trhodes at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Aug 2004 08:50:15 -0400
> Bill Moran <wmoran at potentialtech.com> wrote:
> 
> > Anthony Duerr <duerra at pushitlive.net> wrote:
> > 
> > > Greetings,
> > > My thoughts are concerning the man pages.  I don't know if this is the 
> > > perfect group to mail this to, but it seems to be as close as I could get.
> > > 
> > > Anyway, a thought occured to me this morning when reading through some 
> > > documentation.  It would be great to see an "Examples" section in the 
> > > man pages.  Often times the prototypes are difficult to read or 
> > > understand because of their length, option depth, etc.  An "Examples" 
> > > area in the man pages would allow the man creator to put in a couple of 
> > > the more commonly used prototypes examples in to get a user started on 
> > > the right track.
> > > 
> > > Granted, this would mostly be beneficial to newer users like me, but it 
> > > would save quite a bit of frustration when trying to process the vast 
> > > array of different commands in my mind.
> > > 
> > > I'm interested in your thoughts!
> > 
> > As already stated, many man pages do contain an examples section.  This
> > section is optional.
> > 
> > If you could point out which man pages are lacking examples, it's likely
> > that you could get some folks motivated to add an examples section to
> > them.
> 
> %pwd
> /usr/src
> %find . -name '*.[1-9]' | xargs grep 'EXAMPLES' | wc -l
> 	493
> %find . -name '*.[1-9]' | wc -l
> 	2892
> 
> So basically, you only need to fix 2399 manual pages;
> 
> NOTES:
> 
> 1: This counts files in contrib;

Can't do that.

> 2: Some example sections would be dubious (rc.conf, make.conf, etc);

Agreed.  Many daemons don't need example sections, such as ftpd, etc.

This was why I recommended he point out the particular man page(s) that
he thought needed examples.

> 3: Personally, I honestly don't have the time for a project
>    like this.  Sorry.

Oh, come on.  You're not doing anything else important ... I'll tell you
what ... take the time you spend chasing women around and cut it in half.
You'll still be getting way more sex than me, and you'll have a ton of
extra time to work on FreeBSD stuff!

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com