Documentation Integration (was suggestion)

[<dave@lafn.org>]

On Mon, Dec 13, 1999 at 04:09:38PM -0900, Matt Barkdull wrote:
> For example:  reading the man page on tar, you find all sorts of 
> useful commands and can think of many ways of using them, but what is 
> unclear is how they are used.
> 
> Examples:
....

The LDP doesn't maintain the man page for tar but we should be
concerned about it.  To offer suggestions I think you need to email
bug-gnu-utils@prep.ai.mit.edu.  As you can see from this url, tar is a
gnu product.

But here's what they may tell you:  The manual pages are obsolete and
you should use the info system.  So we don't keep the man pages
up-to-date.  There is also a detailed GNU manual for tar.  

This is all part of the problem of integration of documentation for
Linux.  The material in the info pages needs to be made available in
other formats and a search engine is needed to search every word of
the manual pages, info docs, howtos, etc. all with one search command.
It would be nice if docs that come with application programs (for
example, the detailed gnu tar manual) could be included but one
problem is that they are supplied in various formats.  One may try
using grep at present but it's quite primitive.  One should also be
able to restrict a search to certain subsets or types of documents in
order to speed up the search.  Keyword searching on just the abstract
(or the like) of each doc would also be useful.  David Wheeler has
been looking into integration problems but more people are needed to
work on this.  
			David Lawyer


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