User Guides for Beginners

[Wisht]

call it 'user experiences'  and for the love of god, show the coe.

Oh dear! What is the coe please?

[handy]

code

[filimon]

I have an improvement suggestion for CLI pacman guide.

There should be an explanation of WHY the commands do what they do.

Code: [Select]

pacman -Syyu
Why two Y's?

Code: [Select]

man pacman was not very helpful in getting started either.

[excalibur1234]

Code: [Select]

pacman -Syyu
Why two Y's?

Code: [Select]

man pacman was not very helpful in getting started either.

as far as i understand it:
-Sy looks, whether a new/upgraded package list is available. when it is, it downloads a new package list.
-Syy does not check, whether a new package list is available. it always downloads a new package list and overwrites the old one.

you only need -Syy e.g. after you have changed your from the stable branch to the testing branch of manjaro.

here are links to more detailed explanations of pacman:
http://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php?title=Pacman_Overview
http://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php?title=Pacman_Tips


--------------------------------------


i do not recommend to explain to beginners how commands work. they just want to get something done quickly.

when people are interested how something works, they are not  beginners anymore (at least not very long), because they start to read a lot about it and search for explanations. these explanations can be found in man pages, --help/-h options, wikis, forums, etc.

[filimon]

i do not recommend to explain to beginners how commands work. they just want to get something done quickly.

when people are interested how something works, they are not  beginners anymore (at least not very long), because they start to read a lot about it and search for explanations. these explanations can be found in man pages, --help/-h options, wikis, forums, etc.

I agree with you partially. If I would respond to question of type: "How do I install Whatever via the command line", I would not include an explanation, just the command. But in a tutorial I think these type of things should get mentioned, without becoming the main focus.

My main issue with pacman in particular is that the commands are nigh on impossible to remember for a beginner, here I think an explanation might actually help retention. And the man pages do little to help.

As an example:
Why should I call -Syyu when I want to upgrade my packages when the man pages define the -S operator as sync? Shouldn't I call -U?