🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4io1l4$nrj@solutions.solon.com>,
Henning Makholm <makholm@diku.dk> wrote:
>schwab@lamothe.informatik.uni-dortmund.de (Andreas Schwab) writes:
>
>>|> When I want to find out how to use gcc to generate makefile dependencies,
>>|> all I want is the "quick reference" so that I can find out how to spell
>>|> -MM and whether it has one M or two.  I don't _want_ a long tutorial.

>>A good TeXinfo manual has an `Invoking foo' or `foo Invocation' entry
>>in the toplevel menu, pointing to a node that should be written like a
>>quick reference, with cross references to the more complete
>>documentation.  This is far superior to man pages.

>If all you ever use is Gnu software with info files, then fine. In a
>RealWorld<tm> environment with a large heterogenous mass of software
>users (me!) want to be able to obtain a quickref for any executable in
>their standard PATH via a simple, consistent procedure. Whether the
>procedure consists of infoking some info reader or just using man is
>unimportant - but it has to be the *same* for all commands. I.e. man foo.

It is trivial to replace man with a shell script or any equivalent which
will do the right thing. Speaking of state-of-the-art Unix, IMHO, many
man pages have outlived their usefulness. My pet peeves is the <string.h>
manpage. I mean, this gigantic thing which documents strcpy(), strlen(),
strdup() and more... and doesn't even state which ones are ANSI, which ones
are proprietary (sampling SunOS, Solaris, HpUx, linux, linux seems to be the
only one that has got it right). When you get to big commands like gcc, zsh,
perl, even a `quick reference card' will be too long to be useful, so some
modicum of hypertext is needed.

The main problem I've got is to keep everything properly cross-referenced.
Most existing formats---texinfo, pod, html---are fine, but cross-referencing
is poor at best. Not much better than what existed under the man page 
concept... building a seek-and-retrieve automated mechanisms that would
scan the whole system looking for every tidbit of information and 
cross-referencing would be VERY useful. As far as CS texts go, the only
ones I've found with proper cross-references are:
* the C reference manual of Harbison and Steele
* Knuth's work on litterate programming---definitely need to learn C-Web.
* the PostScript reference manual---but then the material is easy to organize.
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