I fear this thread drifted from Jon's point about improving a tool, instead of replacing it. On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 1:01 PM, Jon Steinhart wrote: > OK, here's another one that's good for chest thumping... > > I am not a fan of texinfo. It doesn't provide any benefits (to me) over > man. > ​Amen...​ ​To me this was just rms trying to inflict ITS/emacs on Unix. Lars points out info is just ITS format, the tool is just emacs commands. The key was that here was a case where the UNIX solution (man) was perfectly reasonable, worked very well. But it was not the likely and in the right flavor of rms. ​ > This is a systemic problem. I have a section in my book-in-progress where > I > talk about being a "good programming citizen". One of the things that I > say > is: > > Often there is a tool that does most of what you need but is lacking > some feature or other. Add that feature to the existing tool; > don't just write a new one. The problem with writing a new one > is that, as a tool user, you end up having to learn a lot of tools > that perform essentially the same function. It's a waste of time > an energy. A good example is the make utility (invented by Stuart > Feldman at Bell Labs in 1976) that is used to build large software > packages. As time went on, new features were needed. Some were > added to make, but many other incompatible utilities were created that > performed similar functions. Don't create burdens for others. > Improve existing tools if possible. ​Which is exactly your point. I think you are spot on here. Instead of rms trying to learn to use Unix the way, he inflicted the ITS/emacs way because he thought it was ``better.'' Which is a tad arrogant.​ I have noted that the folks that don't mind and/or like info, are regular emacs users. Someone like me, who can use emacs, but does not find it the only thing (I could switch between RPN - HP style and algebraic - TI calculators too), just find texinfo to be an annoyance. It's different and one extra place to look. As Jon said, it does not provide any benefits and in fact is a detraction because it means the standard Unix tools like apropros does not index it. Larry has right idea, with his webroff. Make html when it is appropriate I also think, man pages are man pages and not user manuals. The Perl example was classic. We did not learn C from the man page. What we got in the C man page was how to run it. There was a manual (doc) for the language. That should have been a manual (in -ms macros) and then run through Larry's webroff and properly indexed. Then you get everything. Clem -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: