info and man

[Christopher Browne]

On 5/20/06, Paul King <pking123-rieW9WUcm8FFJ04o6PK0Fg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> This is a pet peeve that has been bugging me ever since Linux has
> adopted "info" as the standard for help documents.

Not true for Linux; only for 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.

pinfo is an alternative client that doesn't try to emulate an Emacs
in-the-buffer interface, which is probably preferable for non-Emacs
users.

> 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 /).

Nonsense.  It surely *does* borrow conventions from other programs.
It borrows conspicuously from GNU Emacs.

> 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?

No, they're not.

The history here is that the info format predates the World Wide Web.
At the time it was introduced, HTML *didn't exist*.  The TeXinfo
language, which is what GNU uses, was a quite reasonable choice at the
time, providing a Scribe-like language that permitted doing something
that DocBook only does fairly badly today, namely to allow the Gentle
User to use the same documentation:

a) As a hypertext document, browsable using any info-compatible client
(e.g. info, pinfo, Emacs), and

b) As a typeset printed document of high quality, complete with
various tables of contents (and indexes).

I'm not sure that anyone believes in building man pages anymore; I
don't, in my involvement with Slony-I, as we can put in a DocBook form
of them which is (with some pain) translatable into man pages.  I
suspect that is getting more common than it used to be.
-- 
http://www3.sympatico.ca/cbbrowne/linux.html
Oddly enough, this is completely standard behaviour for shells. This
is a roundabout way of saying `don't use combined chains of `&&'s and
`||'s unless you think Gödel's theorem is for sissies'.
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