Re: coreutils/man/rm.x - fails to mention POSIX "Refuse to remove path/. and path/.., as well as `.' and `..'

[William Bader]

markdown might be a better target than html because it is human readable and 
many web sites can display it as html with wrapping text.
pandoc https://pandoc.org/ can convert LaTex and roff man to other formats like 
markdown, RST, and html.
texi2roff can convert texi to groff -me, -mm, or -ms. I made patches for the 
-me option about 20 years ago to handle most texinfo commands at that time.
Maybe someone could write a new filter that would make simple changes to 
texinfo or groff documents to produce better results in pandoc.


________________________________
From: coreutils-bounces+williambader=hotmail.com@gnu.org 
<coreutils-bounces+williambader=hotmail.com@gnu.org> on behalf of James Feeney 
via GNU coreutils General Discussion <coreutils@gnu.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 24, 2023 1:27 AM
To: Arsen Arsenović <arsen@aarsen.me>; Mike Hodson <mystica@gmail.com>
Cc: Coreutils <coreutils@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: coreutils/man/rm.x - fails to mention POSIX "Refuse to remove 
path/. and path/.., as well as `.' and `..'

On Sun, 2023-09-24 at 02:49 +0200, Arsen Arsenović wrote:
>
> Many standards come and go.
>
> Note that I agree that a better info viewer (and a better info on-disk
> format) are necessary, but groff -Tutf8 -mtty-char | less -R is not
> better.  It lacks the ability to navigate or reflow (the latter '.info'
> also lacks today, unfortunately).
>
> The solution to this is not to downgrade to man-pages, but to make the
> 'info' format better (the source material, i.e. the .texi, for that is
> already there) and to provide a better browser.  ...

Wikipedia tells us that "The Unix Programmer's Manual was first published on 
November 3, 1971. The first actual man pages were written by Dennis Ritchie and 
Ken Thompson at the insistence of their manager Doug McIlroy in 1971."

GNU Info is a de facto documentation standard for UNIX-like operating systems 
in the same way that GNU Hurd is a de facto kernel standard for UNIX-like 
operating systems - which is to say, not at all.  Forcing the user to "jump 
through hoops" - "Full documentation  ... available locally via: info ..." - to 
gain a reasonable overview of the coreutils system commands is little more than 
a juvenile disparaging  of the traditional Unix Manual.

As for Info itself, I will always use "zless 
/usr/share/info/coreutils.info.gz", rather than "info '(coreutils) rm 
invocation'", just to avoid dealing with info's arcane navigation commands.

Arguments about the de facto documentation standard for UNIX-like operating 
systems is not going to be resolved here and now, and adding a couple of 
sentences to coreutils/man/rm.x is not a big ask.