Sorry, but this is wrong. Dead wrong.

I'm claiming that it's not a GOOD system.

>Ah. Like POD, doxygen, and similar systems, all of which can generate manpage output. i.e., dead heat here.

So... How do I make documentation for my bash script (with all its options), make a man page, link it into the central system and all of it without doing anything more than simply declaring options?

And no, doxygen won't help you - it doesn't support bash (I'd actually tried to find an automatic documentation system for bash some time last year - there was none).

>That's great -- if and only if Microsoft wrote the tool. Only useful in a software monoculture.

That's easily adapted if tools' authors provide their own URLs (which they can do in PowerShell - VMWare has its own doc system, for example).

>Yes. Learn about apropos databases and MANPATH. Manpages can be stored absolutely anywhere (as can info pages).

I know perfectly well how most of Linux tools work. I know that one can maintain their own local man databases. And I also know perfectly well that almost nobody does, mostly because it's complicated and error-prone.

>Most of the rest of what you say is a combination of ignorance of what the Unix tools you discuss can actually do, and complaints that things are not acceptable because they're not just like PowerShell does them.

I know most of the standard Unix tools. I've built my own custom distributions from scratch (first time without the benefit of the LFS book) and support a network of embedded devices. I've been using Linux on my desktops since 90-s and can recollect all the steps that have been taken to make Linux to be at least possible to use on desktop.

A lot of these steps involved bashing at least some old Unix-heads with spiked hammers: udev, HAL, KMS, dbus to name a few. Oh, and the whole 'Android' thingie. Now the same thing repeats with pulseaudio, systemd and journald.

>We get that you like it, but we've all been through this parochial 'the newest system I just saw is the answer to everyone's prayers' phase, and, y'know? It's always wrong. There are limitations there: you're just not seeing them.

Some things do solve all the (existing) problems. Because they are designed to solve them.

PowerShell is one such example. It's designed to be a better shell than text-based shells and it excels at it. It's not yet as polished as bash/zsh but it's getting better with each new release.

Of course, PowerShell has limitations and a set of new problems, but so does bash/zsh. And limitations of bash/zsh are MUCH more constricting.