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

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 21, 2020, 22:19 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqzha1q6co.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <ecac8516-e536-80e8-fc72-098406592fd5@iee.email>

Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.email> writes:

Show 9 quoted lines

>> Or are you asking something else?
>>
> I was more coming at the question from the other direction, that is,
> about accessing, normally, the git manuals, and discovering the desired
> information, both for existing and new users.
>
> In your example, you needed to include the extra -w option, specific to
> this 'special' manual, while all the other hundreds of man pages would
> be accessed without it (even on Windows, as the config is set by default).

For those who have help.format set to html, it is no "extra" thing required. I said "git help -w" so that people would understand what I meant regardless of their personal settings are.

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.

Show 11 quoted lines

> We do have the advised `git help -g` to list the concept guides, but
> that doesn't advise about the user-manual, which surely we should
> mention to those asking for help (without them needing a long journey of
> discovery). The list does include `git everyday`...
>
> I appreciate that, for some, there is a view that new users are other
> peoples problems and that knowledgable users already know, roughly,
> which command they wish to use and thus then peruse the appropriate
> reference manual to confirm the correct form for their command. I'd
> rather we direct uncertain users to their appropriate guide quickly,
> using their expected viewer method. Hence the question.

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.

Whatever proposal/volunteering comes from you after your question is answered would be quite interesting. Hopefully that would be one that is beneficial to the project as a whoel ;-)

Thanks.