man pages
man pages
Posted Sep 6, 2008 17:12 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)In reply to: man pages by paulj
Parent article: Feature removal sparks Git flamewar
You're describing the GNU info format ...
Thanks for bringing that up. Info is evidence that almost 20 years ago people recognized that man was outdated. And I believe Info would have taken over the world except for the fact that the worldwide web followed closely on its heels, muted much of its value, and standardized a different markup language.
GNU Info was a heavy influence for me in inventing my own replacement for man-style lookups, but its lack of network capability was the biggest weakness. Using an esoteric source language (compared to HTML) was the next biggest. And you can't do 'pinfo git foo' (hierarchical name space), can you?
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