Git manpage generator

http://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net

by orkoden • 12 years ago

95 23 12 years ago

git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net

ozh• 12 years ago

Fun. Unfortunately, I think it's a bad sign when random mambo-jumbo generated by a Markov chain script looks so much like the real stuff...

ygra2• 12 years ago

Markov chains help a lot in making the output look like the real stuff, that's kinda their purpose in this case. Heck, there have been automatically-generated conference papers that have been accepted and went through peer review (although this might tell a lot about that process, too ...).

git manpages are apparently full of very git-specific terminology and quite dense. I would guess the same model applied to the J documentation would be equally unreadable for the uninitiated. If the source material was more readable and easier to grasp the automatically-generated versions would reflect that (to some degree, until it's obvious that's nonsense).

Silkebacon2• 12 years ago

The generator doesn't use markov chains, it's grammar-based similar to the Dada Engine which powers the postmodernism generator. There's a link to a markov chain based generator in the footer, check it out, it's pretty funny and a lot more random.

dtech• 12 years ago

Heck, there have been automatically-generated conference papers that have been accepted and went through peer review

Those papers were used to prove that those conferences weren t actually peer reviewed.

jordigh• 12 years ago

I wonder, since this is an obvious parody of the sorry state of git's manpages, do people find Mercurial's manpages any easier to read?

http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/hg.1.html

DougBTX• 12 years ago

Mercurial's seem to assume less knowledge, the bisect pages are a good example.

Mercurial bisect:

    This command helps to find changesets which introduce problems.

Git bisect:

    Find by binary search the change that introduced a bug

Someone could happily use Mercurial bisect without knowing that it is doing a binary search. The Mercurial docs also get into simple examples before explaining all the options, while the git docs list all of the options first, which presumably could scare people away who are just after simple usage.

jimktrains22• 12 years ago

On the flip side the git docs provide more useful information about what it's actually going to do to help you, not just in general how it'll help you.

username223• 12 years ago

Given that HG still calls it "bisect" rather than "find-changed" or something, I would be surprised if it didn't use binary search.

Dorian-Marie• 12 years ago

I find it really accurate to my experience with Git man pages, e.g: https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

pekk• 12 years ago

and yet I still switched to Git, knowing all this, and don't regret it, because it gives me enough power to fit my workflows rather than me serving my VCS all day.

There are now a large number of friendly ways to learn git, if you don't like the man pages then don't use them. It's not exactly uncommon for man pages to have technical material in them

fish2000• 12 years ago

I did not think a random-thing-generator could possibly make me laugh again, but for me `git-shoot-subtree` was the undeniable breaking point.

nandhp• 12 years ago

I wish it had permalinks.

Silkebacon2• 12 years ago

That's a great idea. I'll see what I can do!

Edit: Just added the permalink feature, thanks for the tip!

jvilk• 12 years ago

I made a (very childish) bookmarklet to make it more fun :)

http://people.cs.umass.edu/~jvilk/bookmarklet.html (The "javascript:" link for the bookmarklet is on this page)

Click it when you're on a Git manpage, either legitimate or generated.

Git manpage generator

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