they should just bite the bullet. [LWN.net]

they should just bite the bullet.

Posted Feb 20, 2007 0:22 UTC (Tue) by ofeeley (subscriber, #36105)
In reply to: they should just bite the bullet. by eklitzke
Parent article: Fedora 7 release delayed

"(although you will notice that there are still quite a few packages that are undocumented). For example, GNU does not provide a tar man page!"

No man page != no documentation. There's a perfectly good info page available. (And there's no point digressing into a disparagement of info -- it's documentation.)

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Info pages

Posted Feb 20, 2007 2:01 UTC (Tue) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287) [Link]

Tar man pages vs. info is actually a pretty good example in favour of info. The tar documentation is extensive enough that a single man page would be about as wieldly as the single man page for bash.

Fortunately, bash and tar both have good info documentation.

Info pages

Posted Feb 20, 2007 14:09 UTC (Tue) by ofeeley (subscriber, #36105) [Link]

Oh, I agree completely. I love info. I find it much easier to use than man pages.

info schminfo

Posted Feb 22, 2007 7:13 UTC (Thu) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link]

info is crap. Whatever won't fit into a man page, put into HTML. It's so much easier to read, navigate, search, publish on the Web etc.

info schminfo

Posted Feb 22, 2007 15:26 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Your mileage definitely varies here. (e.g. how easy is it to regexp search a subtree of web pages? Essentially impossible without a lot of extra infrastructure, that's how easy.)

info schminfo

Posted Mar 1, 2007 3:53 UTC (Thu) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599) [Link]

Your mileage definitely varies here. (e.g. how easy is it to regexp search a subtree of web pages? Essentially impossible without a lot of extra infrastructure, that's how easy.)

But that's just extra UI fluff. (I'm not saying it's not useful UI fluff...) Is there any particularly good reason at this point why the underlying file format couldn't be HTML (or XHTML)? The info client could still behave as you like, including multi-page regex grep. Meanwhile, those of us who favor portability could use a standard web browser as the client.

Greg