188 lines
3.1 KiB
HTML
188 lines
3.1 KiB
HTML
<HTML
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>A few thoughts on documentation</TITLE
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>Linux Man Page Howto</TH
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>1. A few thoughts on documentation</H1
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><P
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>Why do we write documentation? Silly question. Because we
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want others to be able to use our program, library function or
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whatever we have written and made available. But writing
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documentation is not all there is to it:</P
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><P
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></P
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><UL
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><LI
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><P
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>Documentation must be accessible. If it's hidden in some
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non-standard place where the documentation-related tools won't
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find it -- how can it serve its purpose?</P
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></LI
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><LI
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><P
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>Documentation must be reliable and accurate. There's
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nothing more annoying than having program behaviour and
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documentation disagree. Users will curse you, send you hate mail
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and throw your work into the bit bucket, with the firm intent to
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never install anything written by that jerk again.</P
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></LI
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></UL
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><P
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>The historical and well known way documentation is accessed
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on UNIX is via the man(1) command. This HOWTO describes what you
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have to do to write a man page that will be correctly processed by
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the documentation- related tools. The most important of these tools
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are <TT
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CLASS="LITERAL"
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>man</TT
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>(1), <TT
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CLASS="LITERAL"
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>xman</TT
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>(1x),
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<TT
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CLASS="LITERAL"
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>apropos</TT
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>(1), <TT
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CLASS="LITERAL"
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>makewhatis</TT
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>(8) and
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<TT
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CLASS="LITERAL"
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>catman</TT
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>(8). Reliability and accuracy of the
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information are, of course, up to you. But even in this respect you
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will find <A
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HREF="q9.html"
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>some ideas below</A
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> that help you
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avoid some common glitches.</P
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>Prev</A
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>Home</A
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>Linux Man Page Howto</TD
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><TD
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WIDTH="34%"
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ALIGN="center"
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> </TD
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><TD
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WIDTH="33%"
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ALIGN="right"
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VALIGN="top"
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>How are man pages accessed?</TD
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> |