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mahmedtan 4 hours ago

I also find myself using https://man.archlinux.org/ a lot. It's much more readable/user-friendly than https://man7.org plus it contains man-pages from their `extra` repo which contains a lot of popular oss tooling.

nextaccountic 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

unfortunately there's a trend lately where many newer cli tools don't have a man page. they put up a --help and think it suffices

even though there are tools to automatically generate man pages those days

wpm 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I should write a tool that converts help output to troff, even if the result wouldn't be as detailed and nice to read as a good man page it would save me the frustration of having to stab at "will i get usage docs with a -h, a --help, a -help, or running it with no args at all".

nextaccountic an hour ago | parent | next [-]

For Rust programs there's https://docs.rs/clap_mangen/0.2.31/clap_mangen/ that will generate a man page out of the help. (I am sure most programming languages have something like this). However, that's only useful if you are compiling the program (maybe distros could patch Rust programs to generate the man page during the build process)

A more general tool would be pretty good. Either for distros to call during build, after building the program proper; or for users to call.

If users are calling directly, it would be useful to, by default, show the regular man page if it exists, and only if it doesn't exist generate and display one out of --help. Also give it the same flags as man etc. In this case, we could do alias man=better_man and pretend this problem is already solved (but it's still better if distros generate it, so that they can display the man page on the web, etc)

Brian_K_White 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Then again, the built-in help can not be seperated from the binary and be missing at run-time.

beej71 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree. If it can be launched from the command line, it deserves a man page.

Rayosay 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's great! I didn't know that Arch had online manpages too. I frequently use https://manpages.debian.org/ for similar reasons.