[MPlayer-dev-eng] Oh. Manpage.

Arpi arpi at thot.banki.hu
Wed Nov 20 18:03:19 CET 2002


Hi,

> Hey manpage writers. Have you EVER tried measuring how much time does it take
> to scroll the manpage even with _PAGE DOWN_ ?? I just did. Four (4) seconds.
i bet it's only 0.1s here on p4 :)

> How can someone reasonably expect someone to read _that_ ? Half the manpage are
> only -lavcopts's alien options... And commonly used options are mixed up with
> all the sophisticated ones that not even a totally bent human being would ever
> use in his whole life. The only system that is present is the ABC-order.

hey man :), have you ever read manpage of bash ? or perl ?
hey, this is mplayer, not a hello world printer app.

we bring the decision some time ago, that manpage shoul dcontain EVERY
single option with all its description. and the html docs should contain the
installation/usage tutorials, not the option/command reference.

> 92% of the 3236 manpages on my system are below 20k in size.

and how many of the manpages on your system is about an mplayer-weight app? 1%?

> I don't have the interest to change this (only a rewrite would satisfy me
> anyway..), I just wanted to say that this is absolutely bloated and monolitic,
> and I don't like it.
who cares

btw i had teh idea (but has been abandoned) that libavcodec related stuff
could go to another manpage, shared by all projects using it.
or at least a different section.

maybe we could do it with filters too... like mpvfilters.1 or so

but imho it's easy to find anything in it (with / key), so leave it as-is


A'rpi / Astral & ESP-team

--
Developer of MPlayer, the Movie Player for Linux - http://www.MPlayerHQ.hu



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