Re: man page improvements

[Andrew Worsley]

Thank-you for your reply. I will try to follow your advice and not

make a general man page although I think it would help.

On 3 May 2016 at 16:28, Andrei Borzenkov <address@hidden> wrote:

30.04.2016 12:48, Andrew Worsley пишет:

​...

> So not wanting to waste my time or other people I thought I should ask
> about what would be acceptable prior to do significant work.
>

I would rather see time spent on improving texinfo documentation.

> I understand that any extensions might create additional work for
> translators.
>
> I am suggesting either:
>
> 1. A generic top level man page "grub.1 "which you get by running "man
> grub" that gives a summary of all the commands plus a brief summary on how
> to perform basic install and recovery.
>

We have texinfo documentation for it. I do not see any need to duplicate
efforts (we do not have that much resources)

​.

​

I have

​generated pdf's from

 grub.texi and grub-dev.texi and will

read them for details but I haven't seen them packaged for debian

so I am not sure how people who install grub would access these easily.​

 

​Hence improving the generated man pages, which is all that is installed, 

is important.

​

​

> Or
>
> 2. Extending the --help information of each command with a basic example or
> two of usage.
>

Again we have texinfo for it. Explaining how to use GRUB does need more
than basic example or two, so man page format is simply unsuitable for it.

If you are willing to help, I suggest you start with documenting four
basic end-user commands - grub-install, grub-mknetboot,
grub-mkstandalone, grub-mkrescue, with nice cross-references to/from
other parts of texinfo as appropriate.
Thank you.

​

So extending the --help usage of these commands which will

appear in the generated man files with this and cross-references to

the texi file documentation. Perhaps a patch or something to the debian package 

to make access to 

the texi file documentation under

​ debian (different mailing list)

would be good too.​

Thanks

Andrew