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Glibc change exposing bugs

Posted Nov 12, 2010 14:06 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)
In reply to: Glibc change exposing bugs by Wol
Parent article: Glibc change exposing bugs

> 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.
So you can with info. You can search the complete manual with the s key. The fact that you don't know this indicates you don't bother to read documentation at all really.
> info, on the other hand, "you are in maze of twisty little passages all alike".
If you had actually read the headings of the "twistly little passages", you would have found that they're really not alike at all. Alas, you don't seem to have bothered and decided to pointlessly whine about info instead.

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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,
Wol

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.