Re: knowledge base/docs site?

[Gene Heskett <gene_heskett iolinc net>]

On Thursday 02 January 2003 12:40, Pat Suwalski wrote:
>Likewise, I don't see any advantage of the format over any other.
> I think what's appening is that people WANT to establish a
> standard. But from the way even the knowledgable have been
> arguing on the list (Docbook vs latex vs something else), I'm not
> sure DocBook is the right thing for a standard. Seriously, a
> FAQ/Knowledgebase good-'ole HTML which is searchable and indexed
> would be best. Those are my two cents.
>
>--Pat
>
>On Thu, 2 Jan 2003, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> I repeat, if I can't use it like a manpage, of what earthly use
>> is it?

I'd have no objection to Docbook, IF I COULD GET IT TO ACTUALLY 
WORK!

And thats my whole point, Pat.  Even with a full install, there is 
still no obvious method to read a docbook file, formatted as the 
author intended.  If I have to write a 30k perl script just to 
translate it into something readable by troff, man, or info, then 
its never going to happen here.  Ever...  Don't know perl.  Got no 
hankerin to know perl even.  Some C, some bash, some rexx/regina, 
but perl?  Lisp? Nuh-huh.  Life's too short for that even if you 
were only 18, and I've used up that plus another 50 of my lifeline.

My argument is that anyone coming into linux as a newbie is going to 
want to have available as much info on how to make this do that, 
far more than you or I because for the most part we came up thru 
the ranks of old moto machines that ran their own flavor of a 
multitasking operating system.  We at least have a clue as to what 
we need to do *in most cases*.  I went thru this same stage when I 
first installed rh5.1.  The installer did not set up a default 
$MANPATH that pointed even down the street adjacent to where red 
hat in their infinite wisdom, decided to put the manpages, so 95% 
of the manpages were there, but inaccessable.  And at that point in 
time the man utility's ability to take a full pathlist to the file 
was apparently broken also, or the man man page was inaccurate in 
its limited format.  The only way I was able to read that was to cd 
to the directory it lived in, and do a "man ./man.gz" or whatever 
it was called 5 years ago.

We can teach ourselves a lot about a new system if the docs are 
there in a quickly accessable format.  Once 'man' got all its stuff 
in one sock, then most of us can be off and running.  Sadly this 
took till about rh6.2.

If I had to got back to the situation as it existed at the RH5.1 
level, then I'm afraid I would have formatted the drive and and 
installed (yyeeauuchhkk) windows.  Or stuck the machine away and 
spent my time resurrecting my big box amiga which could do things I 
still haven't managed to duplicate with linux.  Like read my mail 
and news offline.

Man pages are for the masses, quick, convienient.  Type two words 
and your're reading it.  Info isn't universal but works ok where 
there is an info file, which there isn't >75% of the time.  We sure 
as heck don't need yet another file format for the help files.  And 
thats exactly what Docbook is, Yet Another Confusing Markup 
Language For What Should Be A Plain Text File So Everyone Can Read 
It.  Make whatever you want out of that for an acronym.  The only 
comparable acronym I can come up with is TANSTAAFL.  And this ones 
way too expensive for Joe Six-Pack.

Now, I fully expect that my rantings will be dismissed as the 
rantings of an old man, but dammit this directly effects the 
impression linux gives to the newbie and it needs ALL the help it 
can get in that dept.  Docbook is to me, a case of doing something 
just because you can, but that doesn't mean you should.  In no case 
is it to mean that it should be done in place of the existing 
manpages system.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III 500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP 1400mhz  512M
99.21% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly