Jerome_V_Vollborn@cup.portal.com (03/07/90)
I agree with Bill Wolfe about the quoted statements in the "BUGS" sections of the man pages. Try to pretend you are a manager is a customer shop who is looking at the man pages before investing your company's money in Unix based systems. While I like humor, these sections are very poor customer relations. The C/Unix community is not alone in making this mistake but that is not a reason to continue making mistakes or refrain from correcting past mistakes where possible. Not looking at documents from the customer perspective is one of the marks of engineers. We all need to improve in this area. Jerome Vollborn (Jerome_Vollborn@cup.portal.com or uunet!lci386!jerome)
jamiller@hpcupt1.HP.COM (Jim Miller) (03/10/90)
>Not looking at documents from the customer perspective is one of >the marks of engineers. We all need to improve in this area. The Un*x man pages tend to be for programmers, especially the ones under attack/consideration. "WE" are the users for most the subjects under definition. The Manager is the buyer, not the user. I will maintain that the pages are more useful to the user (me) the way they are, even if not as pretty to the buyer. If the buyer asks his customers (the programmers) which they prefer instead of telling him what he needs (and how long it will take, and what exactly will be in it, and never mind the two are not compatible ...) the man pages as they exist will win out over "professional" (suit, tie, and useless) ones. jim - i like them, i use them, i do not like the alternative - miller
goer@sophist.uucp (Richard Goerwitz) (03/11/90)
In article <5940019@hpcupt1.HP.COM> jamiller@hpcupt1.HP.COM (Jim Miller) writes: >>Not looking at documents from the customer perspective is one of >>the marks of engineers. We all need to improve in this area. > > ...the man pages as they exist will win out over "professional" (suit, > tie, and useless) ones. Sorry, SCO Xenix (and I'll bet SCO Unix as well) doesn't have a "bugs" section in its manuals. They call it "comments" or the like. Xenix is probably the most popular Unix variant ever to have hit the market. It does seem a bit childish to, in effect, censor the word "bugs" from manual pages. The statement that the "suit and tie" straitjacket will never win out, however, just isn't true. The suits and ties invariably get control of any situation they find it useful to control :-(. It's a sad by-product of our economic system. -Richard L. Goerwitz goer%sophist@uchicago.bitnet goer@sophist.uchicago.edu rutgers!oddjob!gide!sophist!goer
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (03/11/90)
In article <7962@tank.uchicago.edu> goer@sophist.UUCP (Richard Goerwitz) writes: >... SCO Xenix (and I'll bet SCO Unix as well) doesn't have a "bugs" >section in its manuals. They call it "comments" or the like... >It does seem a bit childish to, in effect, censor the word "bugs" from >manual pages... This is common. The reason is the US's demented liability laws, which make sane companies reluctant to do anything which might possibly be misconstrued as hinting at knowledge of defects in products. -- MSDOS, abbrev: Maybe SomeDay | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology an Operating System. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
darcy@druid.uucp (D'Arcy J.M. Cain) (03/12/90)
In article <27625@cup.portal.com> Jerome_V_Vollborn@cup.portal.com writes: > >I agree with Bill Wolfe about the quoted statements in the "BUGS" >sections of the man pages. Try to pretend you are a manager is >a customer shop who is looking at the man pages before investing >your company's money in Unix based systems. You forgot the smiley. A manager looking at man pages before buying UNIX! HAHAHAHAHAHA. > While I like humor, Yah, it shows. -- D'Arcy J.M. Cain (darcy@druid) | Thank goodness we don't get all D'Arcy Cain Consulting | the government we pay for. West Hill, Ontario, Canada | (416) 281-6094 |
amull@Morgan.COM (Andrew P. Mullhaupt) (03/12/90)
In article <7962@tank.uchicago.edu>, goer@sophist.uucp (Richard Goerwitz) writes: > Sorry, SCO Xenix (and I'll bet SCO Unix as well) doesn't have a "bugs" > section in its manuals. They call it "comments" or the like. Xenix > is probably the most popular Unix variant ever to have hit the market. > It does seem a bit childish to, in effect, censor the word "bugs" from > manual pages. The statement that the "suit and tie" straitjacket will > never win out, however, just isn't true. The suits and ties invariably > get control of any situation they find it useful to control :-(. It's > a sad by-product of our economic system. SCO UNIX System V/386 r3.2 does not have a 'BUGS' section for its entries, (as far as I can tell). The man page for units is made up of sections called: Name, Syntax, Description, and Files. It is clear and sensibly written, and gives no disclaimer about exchange rates. (Although Morgan Stanley is not likely to base financial plans on the 1.7187 dollars/pound conversion it contains...) I think there is a bit of confusion about people's tailors and their ideologies. I was a long hair math professor and strenuously objected to the BSD 4.2 man pages (and lots else about that calamity) and now I work for an investment firm (still have the long hair, but do wear suits) and have the same ideas about man pages. In the same department as I work, there are some UNIX guru types, and they all wear suits, have long or short hair according to taste, but most of them think BSD man pages are cool. Most of them wear better suits than I do. We all work for Morgan Stanley. (Can't get more Wall Street than that.) So what's the point? There are several types of programmers in the UNIX environment. Some, like myself, are programmers by dint of skill in another professional field - (numerical analysis, algorithmic complexity and applied math in my case) - and some are UNIX/C natives. The natives find all the little quirks familiar and no big deal, and appreciate the odd bit of askance humor in the man pages. The OS/language itinerants find all matters of operating system obstuctional, and language inadequate, and can't seem to understand what was so sensibly constructed in OS-A/Lang-I is so idiotically tied to history in OS-B/LANG-II. UNIX/C natives are not particularly more or less sensitive to the observations of the itinerants than are say the MVS/APL2 natives, or the VMS/Pascal natives, or the NOS/FORTRAN natives, etc., (at least in my experience) but they are somewhat more entrenched in the condenscending attitude that theirs is the most advanced world with the best stuff and no need to think about incorporating the other world's better ideas into their future. Well, every itinerant knows full well that what's hot today is just that... hot today. Tomorrow will bring another OS and another language. The itinerants will move on, and some of the natives will, too. Lots of the natives will continue to fight the battles that their OS or language already won, and this rear guard action is the source of the worst bigots. Personally, I can see that the past six years have been good to UNIX. It used to be a rickety monolingual child with dreadful bugs, but now it's graduated to being a second-rate operating system, like everything else. (I ain't seen a first-rate OS yet...) C has grown into a definite language, but by finalizing some of it's more painful mistakes. It'll stick around like FORTRAN, but I'll look elsewhere for the future. UNIX/C will have it's day, but I'll be surprised if C's "market share" isn't seriously threatened by languages which benefit from more modern thinking in the next five years. Later, Andrew Mullhaupt