Re: info info; man info (documentation about info)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Dave Kemper <saint.snit@gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2023 00:01:33 -0600
> Cc: Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@gmail.com>, 
>  "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>, help-texinfo@gnu.org
> 
> On 1/7/23, Arsen Arsenović <arsen@aarsen.me> wrote:
> > Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@gmail.com> writes:
> >> How about adding the following:
> >>
> >>    For readers more familiar with manual pages, it might be interesting
> >>    to pipe info(1) through less(1):
> >>
> >>            info info | less
> >
> > This suffers from decreased navigability, though, as links (xrefs and
> > menu entries especially) become non-clickable.
> 
> That's a judgment call.  I find it more navigable despite that
> restriction, in part because the entire manual is available on one
> (virtual) page.  Admittedly I'm also more familiar with "less" than
> with the "info" interface, but "less" can be used to browse any file
> or pipeline output, whereas "info" can be used to browse only info
> manuals, so the "less" interface is by far the more useful one to
> master.  This is in line with the Unix philosophy: use combinations of
> simple tools to do complex things.

An Info manual is much more than the sum total of the text in it.  The
cross-references and the index commands make finding stuff in an Info
much more efficient and fast, and the ability to jump to a
cross-referenced material and then come back allows to consult the
details without losing the context and the main subject you are
reading on.

It is not a coincidence that the GNU project deprecated man pages in
favor of Info manuals.  Frankly, I cannot even understand how you can
compare a linear reading through sufficiently long text, with only
Less-style regexp search as your navigation aid, with what an Info
reader provides when you read an Info manual.

> The important thing, I think, is that nowhere does the man page
> mention info's behavior when its output is piped or redirected.
> "info" being interactive, it probably doesn't even occur to most users
> *to* pipe or redirect it (it certainly didn't to me until someone else
> pointed out that trick), and none of the examples in the EXAMPLES
> section take advantage of this.  A single sentence about this in the
> DESCRIPTION, plus a single example illustrating it in EXAMPLES, would
> let users deduce the "| less" behavior even if that was not the
> specific example used (though it does seem the most obvious).

It's an obscure capability that is useful in marginal situations.  A
large manual piped like this will present a humongously long linear
text, and I doubt that the result will be a convenient read.  It's
again not an incident that the vast majority of man pages are quite
short and dedicated to a single relatively small subject.