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

[Alejandro Colomar]

Hi Gavin,

On 1/10/23 20:45, Gavin Smith wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 10, 2023 at 02:46:10PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > > From: Dave Kemper <saint.snit@gmail.com>
> > > Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2023 15:36:44 -0600
> > > Cc: arsen@aarsen.me, alx.manpages@gmail.com, g.branden.robinson@gmail.com,
> > >         help-texinfo@gnu.org
> > >
> > > On 1/9/23, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> > > > It is not a coincidence that the GNU project deprecated man pages in
> > > > favor of Info manuals.
> > >
> > > A decision that, decades on, still does not garner universal acclaim.
> >
> > There are people who weren't yet exposed to the superior power of
> > Info, because no one could be bothered telling them the main points
> > and punch lines.  And then there are old habits that die hard.

I've heard similar things about gdb(1) vs fprintf(3).  Yet I haven't found 
gdb(1) to be more useful to me, and still use fprintf(3) as a debugger :)

Just saying that a powerful interface is not necessarily the most useful to 
everybody.

And of course this is not to say that those who prefer gdb(1) or info(1) are 
weird; it's just that I don't find them useful to me.

Diversity is good.

> > The GNU project has as its _policy_ to prefer Info documentation.  We
> > are executing this policy because we fully agree with it, but even if
> > we didn't agree, when we accept the nomination of maintainers of some
> > GNU package, we promise to uphold these policies.
>
> I'll add that our interest here on this mailing list is Info and
> Texinfo, and making those systems better, and in doing so making the
> GNU system better in making a complete free operating system available.
>
> Whether manpages are better or not, is really neither here or there.
> If some other effort wants to use manpages to document their system
> rather than Info then that is perfectly fine and nobody will be
> offended in any way.

I'm curious about how away from man(7) pages that hypothetical GNU OS is.  Would 
you use info pages for libc functions?

So far, I tried to find printf(3) with info(1), but `info printf` brings me to 
the documentation for printf(1).  How can I search for a libc function printf()?

My whole point with info(1)'s manual page is that it's likely to be read by 
people accustomed to man(1) and less(1), so it makes sense to make it easy for 
them to access info manuals  (`info foo | less` is great for that), even if the 
experience is degraded to what info(1) can offer.  info users will not even run 
`man info`, but rather `info info`, right?  What's the audience of `man info`? 
What do you intend for that audience?  How much do you want to enforce GNU's 
"GNU doesn't use man(7)"?  In fact, why is there an info(1) manual page at all? 
I guess Debian's policy helped get that done.

info(1) is a manual page to briefly document how to read info documents, and 
point to the actual info info document for more help, _to habitual users of 
man(7) documentation_ .  Debian is such a project where man(7) is the default 
documentation, and Debian is a big project favoring GNU; I don't think it makes 
much sense to make it difficult to its users to read info docs just because 
Debian is not GNU.

As I said, if it's so good, you'll convince some more users, but they first need 
some adaptation.  I didn't even like GNU/Linux when I was a kid; I just wanted a 
computer with which to play my favorite games.  Windows was better at that.  And 
forcing me to use Linux and let me nothing but a terminal wasn't the convincing 
point.  It was rather having a nice GUI (at the time it was gnome 2), and the 
fact that I could use the terminal when I needed to do precise things.  With 
time, I realized I liked the terminal more, and stopped running many of the GUI 
programs I used.

Cheers,

Alex

>

--
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>

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