info and man

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 12:37:40AM -0400, Paul King wrote:
> This is a pet peeve that has been bugging me ever since Linux has
> adopted "info" as the standard for help documents. 

Linux most certainly has not.  I believe the linux kernel uses docbook,
generating html and others from that.

GNU uses info, no one else really seems to be crazy enough to do that.
man pages are used by many things (just not GNU).

> Am I the only one who finds info unwieldy and difficult to navigate
> through? I use the word "difficult" loosely. If all I want is the
> manpage for a command, I shouldn't have to navigate through anything
> except that single document.

The viewer for info is unusable (pretty much).  Unless you use emacs
(guess who wrote that) to view it, it is a real pain.

> The interface for document navigation under info borrows none of the
> conventions from other programs the way man did. Man used less
> (sometimes more) as the way to present its troff/nroff-formatted
> documents, and that was very simple to navigate (using /).
> 
> A new user would now have to know both less and whatever the thing is
> that is used to navigate through the info nodes. I am not interested in
> navigating through nodes; I just want information on a command. 
> 
> What is the word on man? Is that being phased out? Do we now have  to
> store two formats of the same documentation? I noticed that doing an
> "info ls" gives me the manpage inside of info. Are they similar formats?

Many people have started trying to turn the info pages into useful man
pages, because they too hate info.  Debian actually has a policy stating
all commands should have man pages, and they have written man pages
covering at least the basics for many of the gnu commands.

GNU does maintain man pages for some things (like ls from coreutils)
with the disclaimer at the bottom indicating the full documentation is
found in info.

Len Sorensen
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