Old-timers will recognise this beloved and much-heard advice to novice users who have a question about Unix. It stands for, and I am allowed to swear in this here box, “Read The Fucking Manual.” (Or, arguably, man page.) So helpful, so considerate, and yet, 99% of the time, it worked.
Thirty years later, and we have the Linux Desktop. Don’t bother. Documentation is not the strong point of these loons. Their “manuals” are unsurprisingly on a par with their reading comprehension skills. Or logical thinking skills. Or, well, just skills, I suppose. And the man page is hugely unlikely to coincide with the random lump of distroid crap that it purports to “document.”
Thirty years and going backwards fast. Still, at least it’s PosixCompliant™.
Oh, and whatever you do, don’t try going on Ubuntu Forums. Being sworn at on comp.unix.dumbass.shit was a breeze compared to this. Again, at least you got a useful answer.
Comments
According to ESR, his source IS the documentation. So just RTFS...Read the F-ing Source.
I left that bit out on purpose … it’s from the Unix Hater’s Handbook.
It seemed a little unfair. Also, irrelevant, because the whole point is that you start from RTFM (which was amusing in those far off days) and durn well go backwards.
The reductio ad absurdum, of course, is the quote in the Handbook, which goes something like:
“A big red question mark will appear in the middle of the dash.
“The user will generally know what this means.”
Glad to see that I am not the only one that gets annoyed by the fact that clicking 'help’ on a FOSS program always brings out a webpage that doesn’t resemble a user guide or any useful documentation whatsoever.
Usually, it’s a crappy FAQ explaining how awesome and free the project is, or a link to some forum, or (if you are lucky) a giant wiki were you have to rummage through a truckload of trivial details to get basic stuff working.
People act like this thing is normal, and some will even tell you that goofing around a program’s GUI the best way to learn it, instead of reading a user guide.
See, documentation is one of there things programmers hate doing, and when there is nobody to pay them to do it, it simply isn’t done. But don’t worry, YouDontNeedThat, the source is teh documentation!
@DrLoser
SGI IRIX and Apple MacOS X come with excellent documentation, and they are examples of UNIX done right (contrary to what the freetards say, OS X is a “proper” unix system).
It’s easy to recognize that the guys who contributed to the unix haters handbook were obviously using SCO CrapUnix, SunPOS, and similar other half backed unixes that existed during that era. No complaints for IRIX in the handbook, the IRIX guys even got X-window working.
@Kurkos
We should probably swap my text with your comment – you’ve pretty much hit the nail on the head.
In passing, speaking as a programmer, I like writing documentation.
One other thing about the loons: this “Everybody can contribute, including writing documentation…”
... how do you write documentation for something that you don’t understand?
Realism isn’t their forte, either.
Matthew Austen is a God to me, btw.
Fifteen years on from SGI, and googling “sgi stl toc” is just, well, magnificent.
What have the loons to compare to this?
@DrLoser
If the SGI O2 and the SGI Indy weren’t so moronically overpriced, and they were made available at the price of a PC, I believe things would be different today.
Thank god we still have Mac OS X. The only unix that doesn’t suck.
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