Re: How do Git on Linux users launch/read the user-manual?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 21, 2020, 22:29 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqv9korkg0.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqzha1q6co.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

> Or are you saying that nobody on Linux uses the html format?  I
> should stop keeping the git-htmldocs.git repository up to date,
> if that is the case, but I suspect it is not.
> ...
> Or are you volunteering to update the mark-up (if necessary) so that
> user-manual would become part of "man" ("man git-user-manual",
> perhaps) suite?  That would be an excellent suggestion.

Having said that, I am not sure the way the material covered by the user-manual is presented in is a good match for the manpage format in the first place. Don't modern manpage viewers, or generic pagers that can display textual contents (which may happen to be the "man 1 git" output), or even a terminal enumrator that may happen to be showing the output of such a pager, notice a URL and allow users to activate on it (i.e. visit the HTML document the URL points at, by opening the URL in an already-running browser, or in a new instance of a browser)? So perhaps a better solution for those who live in a text terminal and view our documentation via "git help -m git" or even "man git" would be to write a full URL to reach a version of user manual available to the user, perhaps with file:/// URL "as text" in the man output? Then you do not have to reformat the user manual in the manpage format or anything silly like that.

Hmm?