[TriLUG] promotions for installfest (info pages)

[Jeremy P]

On Fri, 17 May 2002, al johson wrote:

> Well this is the first time I've even heard about "info pages". All the
> books on Linux tell you about are the "Man pages" and how to read them.

Many of the GNU man pages say something like this at the bottom:

       The full documentation for `ls' is maintained as  a  Texinfo
       manual.   If  the `info'  and  `ls'  programs  are  properly
       installed at your site, the command

              info ls

       should give you access to the complete manual.

This is what we're talking about.  And one of the reason the man pages
seem poorly written is because they've taken out all the godo stuff and
put it in the info pages.  This is GNU's idea, but a bad one IMHO.


> Actually, however, if the info pages are written as poorly as the Man pages,
> I'd rather have a list of newbie websites, because although you can find
> these in Google there are a lot of them and some websites are obviously much
> more useful than others. Here again it's best to have someone with some
> experience with these websites. 

Right.  I'm not sure if we should try a big push to write newbie websites
ourselves... unless someone is very dedicated to this, they'll quickly
become out of date, incomplete, etc.  Instead, I'd go for an annotated
list of newbie websites, good HOWTOs, etc, that just link to the best
ones.  Of course, someone still needs to committ to *maintain* that
list... maintenance is the most important part of an effective web site.

--Jeremy