Thursday, May 17, 2007

Man Pages & Documentation

Hey, I'm a noob, I can't read man pages or documentation. They are like so fucking confusing without any examples most of the time. It's like, damnit, telling me what them various flags do doesn't tell me what to put into a conf file compared to a nicely commented conf file for various basic situations!

Exim documentation for example is a bloody nightmare. They have a tons of description on every little thing. Except showing you some examples of how it is put together. No, they throw you Cambridge's complete conf that even they themselves aren't too sure how it all works... -_-


I'm stupid, I need documentation that looks like this

Example 1 To do A
command -flagA value
This makes blah blah command does this

Example 2 To do A but with B exception
command -flagA value -flagB value
This makes the blah blah blah instead

and not some frigging command -aBcDeFgHiJkL [123456] -xYzRsTu [!@$^#]
then a whole textwall making you look back and fro, back & fro trying to match the description with the position and the big picture.

I just need the instructions on how to get the car moving first and will learn along the way why it moves or why I have to step on the clutch before changing gear. But documentation writers seem to want me to learn how to assemble a car from components first.

No comments: