Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

bropages.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 872 posts

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#51

Post by blueblob »

darbelo wrote: post #5

Here's a nickel kid, go buy an operating system with decent man pages.

Man pages are nice sometimes but oftentimes they have a lot of options and no examples. For advanced usage of some commonly used commands it's far easier to just look it up online, or perhaps with this tool. Example good man page is ps, and an example difficult to use one is gcc. Even though the gcc man page has all the options, it's very difficult to figure out which ones you need, whereas something like this (or commandlinefu) might show you the exact command you need with a description of how the different flags interact.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#53

Post by __david__ »

pbreit wrote: post #6
darbelo wrote: post #5

Here's a nickel kid, go buy an operating system with decent man pages.

Any suggestions?

I still maintain Debian has the best man pages of the Linuxes. If you ever try to man a program on a Debian system and there is no man page then it'll mention "man 7 undocumented" asks the user to file a bug report on the package. They encourage package maintainers to write man pages when the upstream package does not include them.

When I've had the misfortune of using RHEL or Centos is when I notice the quality of the Debian man pages—Redhat seems to lack Debian's drive to document upstream stuff.

The only time I've seen Debian's man pages regress is with the ImageMagick package. Its man pages used to be adequate (I believe it might have been a text conversion of the web site/detailed html docs), but now they are not (try to figure out the syntax for the -geometry option using only the man pages).

Back in the day I was impressed by the OpenStep man pages. They had pages for the kernel drivers which I really liked (ie, "man mt" or "man cu"), which showed all the IOCTLs you could call and explained how the interface worked. That might have been a BSD thing, I haven't seriously used a *BSD lately so I can't compare.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#54

Post by chrisrhoden »

FreezerburnV wrote: post #44
belluchan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found out in life that women can also be dependable, fun to hang out with, and not "complicate things." Using "bro" is offensive because it excludes others by their gender. It's an awful exclusionary term and you shouldn't think it funny or ironic. You're not taking this serious. I'm guessing because you haven't any idea of how soul crushing it can be to see this kind of behavior in the workplace when you're a…

To be fair, some people actually use "bro" as an neutral term. I call my wife "bro" all the time, she called one of her (female) students bro, etc. And I'm not trying to downplay any bad behavior by people you've had to interact/work with. Pretty much anything can be used in a negative way in a specific context, and people can be huge jerks. I'm merely trying to say that words which you think are offensive to one gen…

It's really a shame that in the community with which you are currently participating, the word has acquired so many negative associations; I agree.

I also call my (female) SO "bro" – in addition to a broad range of friends and family – in specific contexts. But I would never consider the word neutral or inclusive in the context of the tech community. Too much baggage. If any of the people I call "bro" were programmers plugged into the same world we are currently plugged into, I would not do it, period.

The fact that everyone in this thread came into this with knowledge of the term "brogrammer" suggests to me that there shouldn't be much of an argument, but I guess that's just wishful thinking.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#56

Post by GunlogAlm »

dewitt wrote: post #15
mkr-hn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bro transcends a single very new and very narrowly-distributed usage.

I think a lot of people are familiar with the term. It is not a compliment. See http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bro . "Obnoxious partying males who are often seen at college parties." "An alpha male idiot. This is the derogatory sense of the word (common usage in the western US): white, 16-25 years old, inarticulate, belligerent, talks about nothing but chicks and beer" "A usually white young male, fou…

Yeah, it can mean all that, or it can just mean "friend"...

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#58

Post by stinos »

imdsm wrote: post #38
wyclif wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's meant to be ironic.

I don't like it to be honest. It seems a bit kiddish really. Great idea though, but I would have preferred something else. Maybe `eg`? eg ls, eg cat, eg less etc.

This is actually a very, very good idea. Everybody knows it, it means one thing and one thing only, and that thing also describes what it does, it probably isn't taken, and fits nicely with all other standard descriptive commands like ls/man/... Nice one.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#59

Post by hodgesmr »

This is a neat idea. I won't comment on the name--but observations on the tool:

Looks like anyone can submit examples to this. Users need to be very careful before blindly copy-pasting the "example" scripts into their shell. Hopefully the voting system will remedy this, but that's not guaranteed. While not nearly as dangerous as copy-pasting from the browser[1], still proceed with caution.

[1] http://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy-paste

Post reply on HN