On Mon, Feb 17, 2020 at 3:51 PM Thomas Paulsen <thomas.paulsen@firemail.de>
wrote:

> >Like Clem, I prefer concise man pages and longer, separate documents for
> those programs where it makes sense. I consider man pages to be quick
> references.
> reasonable.
> I write all my quick references in plain nroff since many years. There are
> gui editors, gui viewers, and lots of cgi search engines && web viewers
> even with hyperlinks. Even under good ole emacs techinfo is redundant, as
> 'woman' can do hyperlinks, which were the only advantage of techinfo in a
> remote past, however time goes on. Today we have help2man, hence the lazy
> ones can do man pages too.
>
>
> 'The problem is that the ecosystem has been fragmented by people doing
> their "documentation" in their preferred formats instead of in a common
> (man) format. This makes the experience one of "is there any
> documentation?" followed by "what's the incantation to get it?" When you're
> looking for the documentation for pdf2svg, for example, and there is no man
> page, how long does it take to figure out that there is no documentation at
> all? '
>
> that's true. In the early 90ths they forced us writing quick references
> with .html. Big confusion. Soon later I found myself converting .html back
> into nroff because that's the UNIX style.
> I know some of us don't like to hear that, but with regards to the gnu
> tool chain, Richard did a lot of good things, however the politics of
> replacing man by techinfo definitely wasn't.
>

I think this showed the wisdom of deleting binaries from /usr/bin when
there was no man page for them...

Warner