🚀 go-pugleaf

   Date: 18 Apr 92 06:39:32 GMT
   From: lm@slovax.Eng.Sun.COM (Larry McVoy)

   Could someone explain to me the value added by going to info files?  If it
   is enough value added, then the whole world should do it, that's cool, I
   can dig it.  If it is just done because groff wasn't there yet, I'd humbly
   ask the GNU world to rethink the value of reinventing the wheel.  Ditto
   for the 4.4 macros & make.

I suspect the info format predates `man' -- if not they're of
approximately the same vintage (mid-'70s).

let me summarise the (non-religious) arguments both ways:
 1 - man is godlike because many people understand the arcane
     multics-derived '*off' macros.
 2 - man is awesome because you really only need one or two pages with
     of info anyway, or just an arg summary.
 3 - man is user-friendly because it's flat and linear (I've never
     understood this argument, myself).  I think what this actually
     means is that many info pages aren't written in a way that you
     can "nn from through every page in some understandable fashion.
 --
 4 - info is intuitive because you can get the whole manual online,
     can skip around as needed, and yet each little page can have just
     the info you want.
 5 - info is supreme cause it's structured; man pages are hard to
     search.
 6 - in the long run info will be more powerful since it can
     provide the ability to hop back and forth between parts of other
     docs.  Man basically won't ever be able to do this

It's true the info program suffered a bit in its translation to unix,
but it's getting better.  Manual writers need to take some stylistic
care so that issues 2 and 3 above can be handled more easily.  And
info could use some augmenttion to make it easier to go directly to a
known node from invocation, and perhaps to read man pages as a
transitional step.

Apart from that, man is prety limited, and I think it will be a good
day when it can finally be retired.