quickguide

[Enrico Zini]

On Sat, Dec 11, 2004 at 11:46:05PM -0600, John Hornbeck wrote:

> I was working through the new quickguide
> (http://69.155.172.150/faq) /quickguide and noticed that almost
> everything that we are adding has its own manual in docbook/yelp
> already.  Are we wanting to just make a watered down version of these
> manuals to act as a fast getting started point?  Or are we wanting to
> include the links to those manuals through yelp and just link to the
> right manuals?  Please let me know.
> I just don't want to start writing if we are only going to link them :-)

The idea was making something that can give an introduction to the
applications, and then link the full documentation.

For example, take the wget manpage.  You want to recursively download a
website, so you install wget and you do man wget.  You read the manpage
and then you can do *anything*, but you still can't recursively download
a website.  Either you end up downloading a limited part, or you end up
downloading the whole internet because the website links elsewhere.

The idea would be to make something like this (possibly with
screenshots):

  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
  wget is a tool to recursively download websites.  It is very powerful
  and flexible, so that it can be used by scripts and can be a component
  of more complex applications.

  Some example uses of wget:

    wget http://www.ubuntulinux.org
    (downloads a single page or file)
    
    wget -O- http://www.ubuntulinux.org
    (outputs a single page or file to standard output)

    wget -r -l0 --no-parent http://www.ubuntulinux.org
    (downloads the whole website)

    wget -r -l0 --no-parent -k http://www.ubuntulinux.org
    (downloads the whole website and converts the links so that it can
    be navigated locally)

  The full documentation of wget is [here]
  ----------------------------------------------------------------------

This way one can:
 - quickly know what wget is
 - quickly get something useful out of it
 - have a link to the full-blown-headache-inducing manual in case one
   wants to use it in scripts.

I reckon it's something that I'd so much like to have in any package I
install (although I wasn't the one proposing it). 


Ciao,

Enrico

--
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico at debian.org>
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