Re: [dwm] dwm and patches

Firstly, although I was asking a genuine question, my tone was a bit
strident just because I find the proliferation of different languages for
doing things a bit annoying and I apologise for that.
(I'm one of the itch-scratcher's rather than a professional FLOSS
developer and I'm happy to make what I write available if it is of use
to other people, but given the choice of learning yet another
markup language for some specialised purpose or improving my grasp
of 3-D geometry, probability & bayesian statistics, etc, I'm kinda loathe
to dive into yet another online grammar.)

Also it's not a rant about Debian: I admire debian's commitment to
providing documentation and, inasmuch as man pages appear to be
predominant, they have to go with that. It just really irks me that
the unix-derived world the standard for documentation is in a language
that's _only_ used for manual pages. Hell, I've learned (or at least had
to at some points produce stuff in) tex,latex,hmtl, xml, docbook,pythondoc,
doxygen, and I'm kinda bored with it all.

This proliferation of markup languages does seem to me to raise the
bar for itch-scratchers who do want to document what they do (in the
sense of writing natural-language commentary on it).

|David Tweed wrote:
|> Just to check: there's no more modern tool/markup language that can be
|> backtranslated to "roff"(?) markup? (I tend to steer clear of working on
|> man pages just because I don't want to have to learn yet another
|> markup language that I'll use for maybe four hours over the course of
|> my entire life.)
|
|Asummed you would have contributed a patch on
|http://www.shortest.de/view/dwm+patches, you could have provided the
|necessary additions in html there, so I could proper add them to the
|respective manpage.

I've been thinking I really ought to add my patch (the `large numbers of clients'
patch which I have posted to this
list whenever I've updated it; also note that it is documented (admittedly briefly)
in a plain text file created by the patch) to that page at some point, but
(AFAICS as someone not terribly interested in wiki/taggi stuff) you DON'T write html there
but something else (some language called `Markup'?) and I really don't have
the time & energy at the moment yet another markup scheme.

|Additionally, the people actually writing patches are most of the time
|smart enough that they can alter a simple manpage without knowing the
|format by heart, but by looking at the manpage itself (assumed that they
|do not know it already anyway). Too bad you don't.

It's very possible that I'm not smart enough to do that. Whether that is or
isn't true, it's certainly the case faced with the "do I want to spend the time
to do that" so far I've ended up saying "no". That may be a damning comment
on me, but hey, I never said I was perfect :-)

cheers, dave tweed
Received on Sun Sep 24 2006 - 23:30:35 UTC