[erlang-questions] Erlang documentation -- a modest proposal

Stanislaw Klekot erlang.org@REDACTED
Fri Sep 23 18:19:51 CEST 2016


On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 05:50:59PM +0200, Loïc Hoguin wrote:
[...]
> >I am actually thinking that we don't need PDF at all. HTML should be enough.
> >Man pages can also be questioned since they are limiting when it comes
> >to format.
> >Would be interesting to know how much use there is of our man pages?.
> 
> I use the man pages almost on a daily basis, so much that I added
> them to MANPATH and can just "man erlang" and such. I rely on them
> even more when I have little or no connection to Internet. I go
> online mostly for the user guides and for searching using erldoc
> when I can't remember names.
> 
> Of note, Cowboy and Ranch have had man pages for a few years now,
> and are typically my go-to when I forget something. The inspiration
> for making those available as man pages actually comes from Erlang's
> man pages. I do not know how many people use those though, probably
> not a lot.

I use man pages (and similar things, like info, perldoc, or pydoc)
a lot. Every time I use my own library, which has documentation
autogenerated with EDoc, I regret that I haven't put some more effort to
prepare a man page, compared to what Erlang distribution provides.

-- 
Stanislaw Klekot



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