Ubuntu Help compared with other help systems

[Jeff Schering]

On 4/1/06, Dan McGarry <it.psl at fsp.org.vu> wrote:
> Dean Sas wrote:
> >
> > The version in Dapper allows you to search, however it pulls up all
> > those nasty man pages in the results.
>
> Sorry, but what exactly is wrong? Is it that they're mixed up
> indiscriminately with other results? They're not clearly man pages (or,
> for that matter, are *too* clearly man pages)? Or is the implication
> that man pages have no place in documentation search results?
>
> If that last statement is true, perhaps you could suggest some
> reasonable scenarios in which man pages would/would not be useful in
> search results.

Man pages would not be useful for people who don't or can't use the
command line, because man pages are mostly a reference for the
switches of command-line apps aimed at admins, developers, and geeks.
Man pages for GUI apps typically say nothing more than "see the app's
help menu" for the real documentation. Man pages serve little useful
purpose for non-techie GUI users, the exact users who use yelp.

Man pages in the search results *would* be useful for command-line
users who don't know about man -k.

Similar arguments could be made for the info pages.

Cheers,
Jeff

--
Jeff Schering
GPG: F23C67E8