info and man

[Paul King]

On 24 May 2006 at 17:45, Chris F.A. Johnson spaketh these wourdes:

> On Wed, 24 May 2006, William Park wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 04:22:45PM -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> >> But fortunately, Linux, no matter what meaning you give to it, is NOT
> >> moving towards info for documentation.
> >
> > Thank God.  My pet peeve about 'info' is that it breaks up into pieces
> > and forces me to navigate using keystrokes.  Whereas 'manpage' gives me
> > single document which can be piped to 'less'.
> 
>     Which you navigate using keystrokes.
> 

Sorry to poop everyone's party, but it's the "single document" idea that is more 
the issue with me. I guess the keystrokes too :-) But why should I have to learn 
a new interface when there is a perfectly good one already used under "less", 
which is a tool I already use in a number of contexts? The idea was that with 
man, we are using an interface - less - that is familiar to most Unix users 
(Linux included), so is therefore not necessary to have to re-learn a new bunch 
of keystrokes. Time wasted relearning a info is time better spent actually 
reading a manual/help document on the command you wanted in the first place.

And many of the keystrokes in "less" are used in vi. Your UNIX knowledge is 
transferrable to several apps, lessening your learning curve and allowing you to 
concentrate on actually _using_ the operating system. Even in bash, you can tweak 
your .bashrc to allow you to use vi keystrokes to edit your command line. With 
the invention of "info", that knowledge was no longer transferrable to the new 
interface. In a company environment, these things mean time to have to re-learn 
new tricks, and that is money not used to do whatever else you were hired to do. 
I would like to see Linux move toward simplicity and elegance. Info is a move 
away from that trend, in my  view.

And I am so glad to hear of many Linux distros including Debian moving away from 
info. I did notice that no Debian manpages I have read so far contain that 
warning that "this manpage is no longer maintained. please use info from now on".

Instead of hyperlinks, I am perfectly happy with "SEE ALSO" at the bottom of each 
manpage.

Paul King

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml