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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

It may contain all information, but a clear F on UX.

What I find annoying is the number of command line programs that don't even have man pages anymore. Or maybe that's just an artifact of installing them with brew?

What I find interesting is that for the most part (there are exceptions), the older the man page, the more useful it is. Realistic examples. Succinct descriptions. User-friendly terminology. Too many of the newer man pages seem inflated and full of jargon to make themselves seem important or worthy.

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I don't think I've encountered anything on Ubuntu that doesn't have a man page, but it also seems like many of the man pages are created or improved by Debian or Ubuntu/Canonical. Homebrew probably wouldn't have those.

> I don't think I've encountered anything on Ubuntu that doesn't have a man page

Ubuntu pull most of its packages from Debian, and Debian Policy says that every package that provides binaries should provide manpages for them as well. It is not a hard requirement but their absence is considered a bug.

Some ecosystems even eschew manpages. For example, I wouldn't know how to ship manpages as part of a Ruby gem, it's discouraged iirc

For a ruby gem you would most likely use the --help flag. This has the advantage of working on sub commands so you can do `gemname command --help` and get more specific help.

Git has subcommands and still ships man pages. They just put a dash into the name. E.g. `man git-fetch`

> What I find annoying is the number of command line programs that don't even have man pages anymore. Or maybe that's just an artifact of installing them with brew?

A messed-up MANPATH environment variable can also cause man pages to not be found. In ‘man’ used on many flavors of Linux, MANPATH behaves differently from, say, PATH: an empty colon-delimited section means something like “use the system’s regular ‘man’ configuration for finding man pages”. Without that, it seems like a bad MANPATH setting will cause default mannpages not to be found.

I have added packages to Homebrew, and they install man pages when available. Homebrew provides a pretty simple mechanism for doing so. The problem is that many projects just prefer web documents to man pages, likely because the man page tooling is not great.

and because it doesn't work on windows

> inflated and full of jargon to make themselves seem important or worthy

It's simply a lot harder to explain things in simple language, so I'd hesitate to ascribe such intent.

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