'386 Unix Wars

[Rahul Dhesi]

In <1990Dec23.160807.3207 at virtech.uucp> cpcahil at virtech.uucp (Conor P.
Cahill) writes:

>You go on and on about how bad the permuted index is...
                                ^^^

Maybe I'm looking at the wrong UNIX derivative, but:

(a) There is no such thing as *the* permuted index;  there are many of
them, and the user's first challenge is to find the right one.  Also,
there are many manuals for which there is no entry in any permuted
index, because there are many things that are documented in manuals
that are not considered to be part of the traditional "manual pages"
(the "programmer's manual" entries).  The new SVR4 documentation is
even more bizarre than usual:  Each volume contains three to five
different "indexes" of varying quality, and to find anything in a
volume one must look at all of these "indexes" and then do some
additional browsing.

(b) A permuted index based solely on a title cannot be an effective
index.  It may be desirable to have many index entries for a given
topic.  It is not always likely that there will be enough words in the
title of the relevant "manual page" to yield all these entries.
--
Rahul Dhesi <dhesi%cirrusl at oliveb.ATC.olivetti.com>
UUCP:  oliveb!cirrusl!dhesi