Re: Merging manuals (was Re: How do you use GDB to debug GDB)

[Michael Meissner <meissner@cygnus.com>]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2001 at 04:23:37PM -0800, J.T. Conklin wrote:
> >>>>> "Stan" == Stan Shebs <shebs@apple.com> writes:
> >> As a complete asside, it has also been suggested that the two documents
> >> be merged.  From memory GCC did this.
> 
> Stan> GCC still works this way.  GDB has it as a separate document
> Stan> because that's how John Gilmore set it up, and although I wasn't
> Stan> there, I bet Roland Pesch, as the only professional tech writer
> Stan> at Cygnus at the time, strongly objected to gluing the internals
> Stan> documentation into the user manual.  (Probably the same way
> Stan> would have happened to GCC if he'd had any input into GCC docs.)
> 
> Stan> I've thought about merging them from time to time.  The main
> Stan> argument against merging should be obvious; the user manual is
> Stan> just that, and should not include anything that might mislead or
> Stan> intimidate users.
> 
> I think the split users/internals manuals is a good thing.  I've seen
> the puzzled expressions of folks when encountering the gcc manual for
> the first time.  They were quite relieved when they learned that they
> didn't have to learn about all that stuff just to use the compiler.

Note, in the case of the GCC manual, you really can't use the extended asm
extension, without knowing what the valid constraint letters are, and those of
course are in the implementation section.

-- 
Michael Meissner, Red Hat, Inc.  (GCC group)
PMB 198, 174 Littleton Road #3, Westford, Massachusetts 01886, USA
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