[svlug] rant about man pages

[Ray Olszewski]

At 11:26 AM 8/24/00 -0700, Erik Steffl wrote:
...
>  what I find more problematic (from tar man page on debian):
>
>BUGS
>       The  GNU  folks,  in  general, abhor man pages, and create
>       info documents instead.  The maintainer of tar falls  into
>       this  category.   This  man  page is neither complete, nor
>
>  that sucks (IMO). mainly because I find info extremely appaling.

Welcome to Open Source/free software (choose one). I agree that this is an
unfortunate development. But it is not surprising that people who are
working for free do, more or less, what they prefer, not what you (and in
this instance, I) prefer.

I suppose you could respond to this gap by volunteering your own time to
write some man pages (or HowTos, or whatever form of documentation you
prefer). To my eye, most of the existing docs, in all forms, could benefit
from the touch of a skilled writer. 

Why doesn't this actually happen? I can't speak for you, of course, but my
take is that the Open Source/free software (choose one) culture doesn't act
like it values good writing ... except perhaps the occasional bit of
advocacy. I know that this perception on my part is the main reason why I
abandoned documentation writing for this community. (Of course, it's
possible that I'm really just a lousy writer, and people were reacting quite
appropriately to me and my efforts.)

You get what you pay for ... if you define "pay" to include the full range
of rewards people get from doing things. Writing good documentation, by
itself, doesn't appear to generate much in the way of rewards of any sort.


--
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski                                        -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA           	 	         ray at comarre.com        
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