Some thought about man pages

[Ambrose Li]

Hi,

On Tue, Sep 29, 2020 at 02:00:28PM +0200, Emanuele Petriglia wrote:

> I would like to improve the consistency in the existing Xfce
> documentation by starting to handle these man pages. So I propose a
> solution. For every Xfce package:
>
> 1. If the package has a man page, remove it; 2. Add a basic man page
> that simply redirects to the on-line documentation (because some
> operating systems, like Debian, always require a man page); 3. If
> the package provides command line options, document these options on
> docs.xfce.org.

[...]

> If you like this proposal, I can start to work to fix all packages :)

I don't know why we have decided to exclusively use online documentation
(sorry, I don't really closely monitor this list), but as a user
I really appreciate man pages. For example you can't read online
documentation when your internet isn't working, and often that's when
you want to pull up a man page. A man page that simply redirects you to
online documentation would be worse than useless.


-- 
Ambrose Li <ambrose.li at gmail.com> | Time zone: UTC-4 (Eastern)
ambroseli.ca

“Simplicity and naturalness are the truest marks of distinction.”
— Somerset Maugham