Re: What does 'safely' mean in man mktemp?

[Bob Proulx]

Peng Yu wrote:
> I don't see the point of making the man page same as the help. Why not
> make the man page same as the info. Just think about how people is
> going access the info for the full information. People first have to
> run 'man mktemp' then find the command "info coreutils 'mktemp
> invocation'" (which is long and harder to type and remember, compared
> with 'man mktemp').
> 
> Considering this, having duplicate help and man is just a waste, in my
> humble opinion. It is just better to make man of the same content as
> info.

It is a matter of perspective.  The point is that we are building a
GNU operating system.  The preferred documentation format for GNU is
info format not man format.

The question is one of philosophy.  If you are running a GNU operating
system then you expect to have info documentation.

If you are running a non-GNU system and are only using the GNU
software as an additional port to it, then you could nag the people
doing the port from GNU to non-GNU to convert the GNU documentation to
whatever native formats used there, probably man format but possibly
html or possibly other formats.  But then that isn't a problem for the
GNU developers who are already developing documentation in the native
GNU info format.

The man pages from the --help output is done to make the creation of
man pages easy enough for developers to justify the effort of doing.
Because otherwise man format documentation would not exist at all.

I always start with the info documentation first.

Bob