@lightning @apgarcia @zash @ska
No.
$find /usr/share/man -name perl\*|wc -l
152
$
Anyone reading this who now goes to find out what these #OpenBSD manual pages are, immediately proves the point that counting the number of manual pages with wc(1) isn't a valid criticism. They've demonstrated by their own actions that it's a metric void of meaningful information.
@apgarcia @lightning @zash @ska
Again, though, that shows exactly why counting manual files with wc(1) is silly. It tells one nothing whatsoever about the amount of documentation one should read for any particular task. About all that it tells one is that documentation to be read exists, which is in fact a good thing.
No-one is daft enough to assert that because Debian has more than 81,000 man pages; the amount of documentation one has to read to use Debian is not commensurate to the task.
@JdeBP @lightning @zash @ska your 81,000 man page count is wrong.
$ ls /usr/share/man/man8 | wc -l
784
$ ls /usr/share/man/man8 | grep -c systemd
116
@apgarcia @lightning @zash @ska
It's not mine. It's unix.com's count of Debian manual pages. Rounded down to the nearest thousand from 81,313.
@apgarcia @lightning @zash @ska
What you provided is nonsense, though. There aren't 784 section 8 manual pages in #Debian. There may be that from the arbitrary set of packages on 1 machine, but even that has nothing to do with what one needs to read in order to run a system.
For starters, one would be foolish to think that one even starts there, instead of the Debian Administrator's Handbook, which isn't measurable in man pages.
You just aren't measuring anything meaningful.
@apgarcia @lightning @zash @ska
No, it hasn't. You've wrongly convinced yourself that it has value, but there is no value at all from a practical standpoint, no metric that can be actually used.
Try this practical exercise:
Name one concrete quality measure that you can deduce about package A versus alternative package B in #Debian, from the knowledge that A has 46 manual pages and B has 106 manual pages.
Your counts of #systemd man pages are exactly as devoid of value as those numbers.
@JdeBP @lightning @zash @ska quality measure, no, i can't, and i never said i could.
the sheer number of man pages tells me that systemd is sprawling. that's all i ever claimed.
@apgarcia @lightning @zash @ska
"sprawling" is a quality judgment, though.
You're claiming that you can tell this about #systemd from knowing that it has 216 manual pages but cannot tell the same about package B with its 106 manual pages, despite having exactly the same information, the count of manual pages, for both.
Is package B "sprawling"? Is #s6 with 88 pages? Or #execline with 62 pages?
If you don't know for them, you cannot know for systemd based upon exactly the same information.
sprawling: to spread or develop irregularly or without restraint.
if that doesn't describe systemd, then I don't know what does. yes, it's a judgment. to me, it's also common sense.
JdeBP
apgarcia