On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 04:42:53PM +0000, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
> Clem Cole wrote:
> > I always got the impression that texinfo was more of a shot against
> > man pages and trying to push the purity of the 'ITS-way' to Unix.
>
> ITS had a hypertext documentation system, so my assumtion would be that
> RMS wanted to bring along that to the GNU vision.  I don't see that's it
> would be abount purity, whatever that would mean for documentation.

So you know how when you go into someone else's program to fix a bug and
they have a hideous coding style?  Have you ever had someone else fix a
bug in your code and they reformat everything so git blame looks like
they wrote the whole thing?  That's rude, right?  If you were fixing
the bug in some crappy coding style, you fix it in that crappy coding
style, it's not your style but it is the polite thing to do.

If we agree on that then we can move on to RMS and texinfo.  Providing
texinfo docs for Unix commands is like reformatting the code.  It's
rude.  The Unix way is man pages for basic usage and a user guide,
usually in -ms.  Not doing it that way is trying to change the way
the system works and it's just rude.

If I were working on ITS and techinfo is how they do their docs, that's
how I'd do docs there, it would be rude to force man pages on system
that doesn't work that way.