Re: [dwm] dwm and patches

To make a final statement. This is UNIX, in UNIX there is only
one proper format for me to document the usage and purpose of
software, also called a manual, and that's a man page ;)

I'm no friend of all those different help systems nowadays. Man
pages are the way to go, still and hopefully also in the future.
;)

(Also because it's simple to just run troff to make a ps or a
 pdf out of a man page, if it gets necessary to print manual books
 about specific UNIX software).

Regards,
        Anselm

On Thu, Sep 28, 2006 at 12:41:51PM +0200, David Tweed wrote:
> Firstly, I've been away for 3 days which is why I've been slow responding.
>
> |On Mon, 2006-09-25 at 08:15 +0200, Anselm R. Garbe wrote:
> |> On Sun, Sep 24, 2006 at 09:30:04PM +0000, David Tweed wrote:
> |> > 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.
> |
> |The book "Unix Text Processing" is available here in a variety of
> |formats:
> |http://home.alltel.net/kollar/utp/
>
> Just to be clear. Firstly, all I really wanted to do in my original message
> was to find out if there was a way to do manpage writing/modification
> without having to deal with having to figure out troff.
>
> Secondly, I wasn't suggesting that roff (or whatever the language is called)
> was exceptionally hard. It's just that it's _yet another_ language to have to figure
> out, which given my understanding (at the time) that these days (eg, the last
> ten years) it wasn't used for anything other than manpages and that I really
> don't have _time_ for all the intellectually interesting projects I want to
> tackle, let alone the vast mass of languages that seem to be needed to do
> only one thing, annoys me.
>
> FWIW, I still think that the proliferation of "not more than marginally
> better than each other" languages raises the barrier for "itch-scratcher"
> code modifiers. Of course whether that's important is dependent on
> your view of how important they are.
>
> > troff has been there for ages, and it is not a man-page
> > language, it is simply a formatting-language. Those guys at Bell
> > Labs wrote papers and books in troff+eqn. troff makes it easy to
> > present man pages in a vt100 pager, as PostScript document, as
> > html, or whatever you want. Uriel made his presentations with
> > troff btw.
>
> Note I didn't say it "was" a manpage language, but that it was only
> _used_ nowadays for manpages (although I think I missed off the
> nowadays). I'm happy to learn how somebody has decided to structure
> yet another computer langugage _provided I can amortise the cost of that learning
> over a lot of end work_; my "annoyance" with man-pages is that I'll
> certainly write at most twenty over the course of my life. Uriel writing his
> presentations in roff presents a counterexample that .
>
> Anyway, thanks to Antoni Grzymala I now have a set of tools to
> avoid that. I'll stop ranting now :-)
>
> Sorry for the flame war,
> cheers, dave tweed
>
>
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-- 
 Anselm R. Garbe  ><><  www.ebrag.de  ><><  GPG key: 0D73F361