'nmake' manual pages

[Earl Wallace]

My experiences with 'nmake' (from the AT&T ToolChest) indicate a serious
problem with "manual pages" in UNIX-land.  There seems to be this belief in
UNIX-land that all a program needs to be considered "production quality" is
a few manual pages.  I disagree.  This attitude may be fine if the programs
are going to be used by people who don't mind spending nights and weekends
debugging "production quality" programs and/or "enhancing documenation" to
enable these programs to be used by others who might just want to work a
normal 60 hour week :-)  But for some of us, we just might have a real job
that needs to be accomplished and the programs we use should help us to do
that job and not hinder us.  Gee, if we want to spend money and person-power
debugging programs, we would write our own! :-)

Think about this:  Everyone who bought the $1,??? 'nmake' program will end up
spending at least a full 40 hours of their time debugging the code and trying
to fill in the holes left by the lack of documenation.  Then they can get on
with the job of building the "rules" to fit their environment.  I should have
spent 0 hours debugging the code and should have been able to take the
documenation, lay in bed, beach, etc. and read it without having to "try this"
and "try that" on the system until I figured out the rules. It's a powerful
program, but it's shame that the bugs and documenation make it appear worst
than it really is and we all know how long-lasting first impressions can be.

The documenation that comes with 'gmake' puts 'nmake' to shame.  You get the
impression that the GNU folks really want people to use their software.
Imagine that!

If AT&T wants to make money and have a group of happy customers, it would
offer an upgrade to 'nmake', complete with new, and better, documenation with
all the bugs fixed.  And the word to everyone in UNIX-land who writes these
programs:  provide good documenation along with your programs and if the
program has any value at all, it'll be used instead of a program that does the
same thing, but isn't documented as well.