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

[Arsen Arsenović]

Dragan Simic <dsimic@manjaro.org> writes:

> On 2023-09-25 12:58, Rob Landley wrote:
>> On 9/24/23 01:37, James Feeney via GNU coreutils General Discussion wrote:
>>> Sorry, that was probably a bit harsh.
>> No, people used to regularly boggle at why info still exists:
>> https://www.reddit.com/r/gnu/comments/240mle/why_does_gnu_cling_to_info/
>> https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/77514/what-is-gnu-info-for
>> https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/159859/why-didnt-gnu-info-succeed-man
>> https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxadmin/comments/27dxrr/does_anybody_use_gnu_info/
>> These days, info seems so dead nobody talks about it at all anymore.

Not at all.  It is, unfortunately, far more structured and usable than
man-pages.  The standalone viewer just happens to suffer from emulating
Emacs.

Info is not perfect (in fact, I consider the on-disk format rather
terrible), but it has source material which can do better, which is far
unlike pages written in roff.  See my other emails which cover how Info
can be made far more accessible.

> Here's a brief insight into what happened about 15-20 years ago when I tried
> using GNU info for the first time...  I failed to see how is it supposed to be
> used, and how the actual information is to be reached, after trying that for
> ~10 minutes or so, maybe even a few times, IIRC.  Mind you, I _wanted_ to use
> info, and I did learn to use vim beforehand, which seems to be a posterboy for
> hard to use utilities.

Vi(m) being hard to use is somewhere between an urban legend and an
inside joke.  It's a ubiquitous tool with a very slight learning curve.

Here's an example session with which you can find, for instance,
warn_unused_result in the GCC manual:

 $ info gcc
 i warn_unused_result RET

This is something you couldn't do with a man-page and a pager, as
searching for 'warn_unused_result' will produce false matches.  This is
far worse with soemthing like '-g' for obvious reasons.  To reach the -g
flag in the GCC manual, you can:

 i g RET

which will immediately bring you to it.  In case it does not, you can
continue the index search using ','.

When opening info, you should be able to hit 'h' to get access to a
walkthrough on how to use info.  Unfortunately, this might be obscured
on your system, as many distributors package that manual as part of
Emacs rather than Texinfo (which is, again, due to the standalone viewer
suffering by trying to emulate Emacs, and so, trying to reuse its
manual).  My TODO list has filing bugs with a bunch of distributors to
fix this, but so far I have not tended to that.

>> Here's a patch I used to apply to binutils 11 years ago:
>> https://github.com/landley/aboriginal/blob/master/sources/patches/binutils-screwinfo.patch
>> Rob


-- 
Arsen Arsenović

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