From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Nov 3 4:53:30 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-27-149-77.mmcable.com [24.27.149.77]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 179AB37B4FE for ; Fri, 3 Nov 2000 04:53:28 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 28271 invoked by uid 100); 3 Nov 2000 12:53:27 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14850.46407.660250.699148@guru.mired.org> Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 06:53:27 -0600 (CST) To: Gary Kline Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: beginners with bsd In-Reply-To: <5878289@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Gary Kline types: > I'll throw in my dime's worth and suggest that every `info' > page be turned into a man-style page with hyperlinks. If > hyperlinks (and space) been available 25 years ago, every > manual entry would've had links. Another think the man > pages would've had is examples. The reason man pages were > so terse was that disk space was extremely costly. Gee, and I thought it was because programmers hated writing documentation. I know I do. In fact, someone here (wasn't it here) recently provided a pointer to an AT&T page on Unix history, wherein one specific person was creditied with making sure that all programs on Unix had man pages - and even to getting some programs rewritten to be up to the standards for the man pages. Now disk space being costly may well be why the original Unix man pages weren't formated, but kept on disk in nroff form and formatted when you read them.