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Glibc change exposing bugsGlibc change exposing bugsPosted Nov 11, 2010 6:41 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)In reply to: Glibc change exposing bugs by butlerm Parent article: Glibc change exposing bugs
What's useless isn't info, but man, at least for documentation spanning more than a couple of pages (like for gcc or mplayer).
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Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 11, 2010 9:46 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] For large manuals, my experience is thatinfo merely sucks less than a man page; the user interface of both /usr/bin/info and /usr/bin/emacs -f info is horrible. For simple things, man wins by a country mile, because it doesn't slice-and-dice a simple program's documentation into 742 one-paragraph pages.
info considered harmful?
info considered harmful? Posted Nov 12, 2010 14:08 UTC (Fri) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]
Another vote for pinfo. It doesn't hate me for wanting to know something like "info" does.
Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 11, 2010 22:56 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
Dividing manuals into chunks of a sensible size is a feature, not a bug. And if you don't like GNU info or emacs, just use something else. You can view info manuals with konqueror by typing info:<program name> into the address bar, and yelp is also capable of displaying info documents.
Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 12, 2010 18:19 UTC (Fri) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
I don't know about you but for anything less than ten pages I find man much easier than info for one very simple reason: It's easy to scroll through a stream of text. It's also easier to hit / and search the whole document, it's easy to not get lost, etc.. Info's problem is that info readers don't default to a man-like one-big-document, which is well known, well accepted and suitable to a terminal (which is, I imagine, where most man and info pages are consumed).
I've used pinfo and it helps some in the UI department, but I'd still use man over pinfo for almost every trivial lookup. If your goal is to completely replace man then your system needs to be a drop-in replacement from a user interaction point of view, with the advantages discoverable by users who are interested in learning them.
Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 12, 2010 18:45 UTC (Fri) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
> easier to hit / and search the whole document
Not really: "info" also searches the whole document if you hit /. (although I share the general dislike for the info browser).
Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 25, 2010 15:22 UTC (Thu) by Spudd86 (guest, #51683) [Link]
info's major problem is that it's interface SUCKS, there's no real 'back' command, the keybindings are just plain weird (unless you're an EMACS user...).
It'd be nice to have an info viewer that converts to HTML on the fly and uses webkit to render it.
Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 25, 2010 22:13 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
Have you tried going to System -> Help? GNOME's "Yelp" supports browsing info docs - providing a web browser style GUI...
Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 26, 2010 0:31 UTC (Fri) by Spudd86 (guest, #51683) [Link]
Don't use GNOME, I wonder how much of GNOME Yelp pulls in
Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 26, 2010 0:40 UTC (Fri) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link]
You could use konqueror instead
konqueror info:tar
Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 26, 2010 1:33 UTC (Fri) by Spudd86 (guest, #51683) [Link]
Don't use KDE either... I use XFCE and try to keep most of the GNOME stuff not installed.
Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 27, 2010 13:26 UTC (Sat) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
Well, if you want a web interface style GUI for info, but don't want to install either of the main two GUI environments, then... ;) Pinfo possibly is closest to what you want. A lynx/elinks style browser interface, for the terminal.
Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 12, 2010 10:36 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]
You are mixing in the same very short post three entirely unrelated things:
- the info format - the info reader - how fine the writer sliced the document Very confusing.
Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 12, 2010 5:01 UTC (Fri) by nicooo (guest, #69134) [Link]
The rest of the world uses HTML and PDF for that kind of documentation.
Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 12, 2010 7:33 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
Funnily enough, a lot of PDFs are written in some other language and generated through TeX (that I read anyway), with PDF being just one possible output format. Which is just how GNU _Tex_info works too..
Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 12, 2010 10:42 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]
HTML does not support indexes, a very useful feature of the info document format. I find most PDF viewers cumbersome for screen browsing; not every surprising since it is a *printer* format at the core.
I find it too bad that a not-so-good default user interface is rebuffing users before then even start to see the nice features of the format. The fix is to promote alternatives user interfaces, something I keep doing constantly (and which has already been done here).
Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 12, 2010 13:59 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
What's your point? You can generate both PDF and HTML from info.
Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 12, 2010 20:10 UTC (Fri) by nicooo (guest, #69134) [Link]
That's texinfo. Using info for online documentation is what everyone hates.
Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 12, 2010 23:32 UTC (Fri) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
And pdf is (done properly) one big page, just like man :-)
Which is why I like man, and like pdf, and just curse profusely every time I'm exhorted to use info!
Cheers,
Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 12, 2010 13:52 UTC (Fri) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
I'd actually say the complete opposite! Even for a complex chunk of documentation, I'd rather have man than info.
At least with man, I can scroll down (or search) until I find what I'm looking for.
info, on the other hand, "you are in maze of twisty little passages all alike". When presented with the instruction to "use info", I give up and use the web. When presented with a 1000-line man page, no problem ... :-)
Cheers,
Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 12, 2010 14:06 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
> I'd actually say the complete opposite! Even for a complex chunk of documentation, I'd rather have man than info.
> At least with man, I can scroll down (or search) until I find what I'm looking for.
Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 12, 2010 19:11 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
Wonder if self-important replies like this have contributed to info's utter obscurity...?
Take a deep breath dude. Different people like different things.
Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 12, 2010 23:39 UTC (Fri) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
Ah. "s" for "search".
The problem with that is if I can't articulate what I'm searching for. The number of times I've searched on what I think is the obvious search key, wasted half-an-hour or so doing it, then done a manual scroll through whatever I can find.
I then find what I'm looking for, and discover that it's called something (to me) extremely obscure, and doesn't mention my search term at all, etc etc.
Plus the fact that I'm one of those strange people who actually DOES tend to read documentation, from cover to cover, and likes to have a straight line path through it, not with redirects and jumps and god knows what all over the place. About the only place I can find information on info is in info - and if I find info repellent, how on earth am I going to find out how to use it if I have to use it to find out?
THERE is your problem with info - if you hate it because you can't find out how to use it, it's catch 22. You need to know how to use it to find out how to use it :-)
Cheers,
Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 13, 2010 0:42 UTC (Sat) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
Oh come on, if you can't stand to use "info info" long enough to figure out that you can use "space" and "backspace" to scroll forward and backward through the document (including going to the next page automatically upon reaching the end of the current one), then I dunno what to say.
Glibc change exposing bugs Posted Nov 14, 2010 22:32 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Well, info's handling of backspace in particular has long been buggy: it has a habit of going up to the top of the current page only, and then halting. Space has always worked, though.
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