From: lyndon@orthanc.ca (Lyndon Nerenberg (VE6BBM/VE7TFX))
Subject: [9fans] info bashing
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2011 10:56:19 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <859eafd17bd9a037fb5c4a18ae3675fb@gandalf.orthanc.ca> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTimVzRkFbF4T8pcWiA9RA=ENUVGB6a3==z8nord5@mail.gmail.com>
> My theory is that GNU tools were so bloated by design that they
> realized that they couldn't write a decent man page for their tools
> so they invented the info pages and the --help flag.
In fairness to info, you have to consider its history. The want was
to be able to present an online edition of some large documents (the
emacs documentation), with cross-references, search capabilities,
index lookups, etc. This was long before the web was even a glimmer
in anyone's eye. In that regard, it was a spectacular success. Being
able to jump around a 400+page document in real time on a VT100
plugged into a Sun 3/50 workstation is a testament to that.
The standalone implementation suffers from being keystroke compatible
with the emacs lisp implementation. Those of us who grep up on emacs
can find our way around. For anyone else, I can't imagine how they
manage to use it.
But as others have said, treating info as a replacement for man pages
is arrogance beyond any rational description. Then again, the quality
of documentation for most GNU software matches that of the code.
--lyndon
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2011-03-25 18:56 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 16+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2011-03-24 6:18 [9fans] troff macros for typesetting books/longer texts Allan Heim
2011-03-24 13:16 ` hiro
2011-03-24 13:55 ` Gabriel Diaz
2011-03-25 11:50 ` Aharon Robbins
2011-03-25 12:25 ` erik quanstrom
2011-03-25 12:37 ` Lucio De Re
2011-03-25 15:10 ` pmarin
2011-03-25 15:23 ` dexen deVries
2011-03-25 15:32 ` John Floren
2011-03-25 15:41 ` John Floren
2011-03-25 20:21 ` Michael Kerpan
2011-03-25 18:56 ` Lyndon Nerenberg (VE6BBM/VE7TFX) [this message]
2011-03-25 19:08 ` [9fans] info bashing erik quanstrom
2011-03-25 19:14 ` Lyndon Nerenberg (VE6BBM/VE7TFX)
2011-03-25 19:21 ` erik quanstrom
2011-03-25 16:48 ` [9fans] troff macros for typesetting books/longer texts Bakul Shah
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