I like Ubuntu

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2007-04-14 12:34, Garrett Cooper <youshi10 at u.washington.edu> wrote:
>Chad Perrin wrote:
>>On Sat, Apr 14, 2007 at 11:52:18AM -0700, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>>>Also, it's Linux-based so documentation in terms of manpages are
>>>most likely non-existent, like with Gentoo Linux.
>>
>> That's by no means universal among Linux distributions.  Debian actually
>> provides better manpage coverage than FreeBSD, for instance.
>
> But some of the manpages are out of date, like for the coreutils
> (I think mv/cp was one of them?). I like the comment in there about
> Stallman liking infopages but Debian-ites having to create a manpage :).
> I personally hate infopages, but that's me.

One of the most important reasons why I like FreeBSD is the quality of
the documentation.  I find it rather appaling that running "man mv" on
Debian shows a warning in the SEE ALSO section:

% SEE ALSO
%     The  full  documentation  for mv is maintained as a Texinfo
%     manual.  If the info and mv programs are properly installed
%     at your site, the command
%
%         info mv
%
%     should give you access to the complete manual.

What is amusing is that exactly the same warning is displayed when one
runs 'info mv' :P

The full documentation of mv(1) *is* available as an Info page, but it
is not where the manpage points the user.

By lurking at the FreeBSD cvs-commit lists, while I was a BSD newbie, I
noticed source changes being rolled back because their documentation was
not ready yet.  I saw BSD people demanding than manpages are updated
after a source commit, and dozens of merges from HEAD to one of the
STABLE branches which treated manpages as first class citizens of the
source tree, and not some entertaining but always out-of-date pariah.

- Giorgos