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RE: anyone wants to help with tutorials writing?
On Wed, 20 Jan 1999, Ziv Friedman wrote:
> I understand that you really like the man pages idea, and it WAS really
> nice once, though it is still a fact in linux.
> Still, considering the multi-level multi-dimensional multi-directional
> characteristic of a good help file (where a word appears, and if you
> wonder what does it mean, you can go and see, then come back, then
> return to some other subject, and so on), have you consider using HTML
> files?
it seems that i've made the (arogant) mistake of assuming everyone here
knew what tutorials i was talking about. i'll be more carefull next time.
the tutorials i refer to are all written in HTML (the only format i
endorsed in the past 3 years was HTML), and can be found at
http://www.actcom.co.il/~choo/lupg/ , under the 'tutorials' section. these
are tutorials that try to teach various aspects of unix programming, from
basic stuff (how to compile a C or C++ program, how to write simple make
files), to more advanced stuff (how to write multi-threaded programs with
the pthreads library).
> I'm sorry to sound old_fashioned, but it seems I kinda got stuck on it
> as far as we talk about help. suppose you read a manpage about 'ls' or
> 'find' and there is some reference at the end of the manual, but you
> still want to keep searching the current. open a new vconsole? why is
> that? aren't we still in the help searching thing?
actually, there is already hyper-text support when using the plain old
manual pages. there is 'tkman', which parses the man page, looking for
text with a format of 'ls(1)', or 'XtAppAddInput(3x)' and adds a
hyper-link to that manual page.
the motivation for a tutorial about using man pages is quite simple: there
is LOTS of material in manual pages, and re-writing it in another format
is rather pointless. the problem is that it has a very odd format, that
newcomer programmers are not used to utilsing. thus, it deserves a
"unix man pages utilising tutorial", and i think i already found a
vulanteer that will help with writing it up.
> I hope I mademyself clear. not everything that already exists is good,
> even in linux, and every good thing will always have a better thing,
> still a minimal level of functionality that is oriented towards the type
> of work needed by a program is not too much to ask for.
yes, you are very clear, and i'd be the one of the first to agree that
there are many bad things about linux (and unix in general). i hope i've
been clearer this time myself.
thanks,
guy