🚀 go-pugleaf

To quote a source at Cygnus: "take a look at the emacs, make, and gcc
manuals.  Tell me where the information on command line options is."

Info files and man pages are two different beasties.  Info files are
geared towards organizing large texts, such as the Emacs manual or
(especially) the Elisp manual.  They're set up for browsing through a
wide variety of topics.  Man pages are designed for fast access to a
small set of facts on a subject: the command-line parameters for
Gopher or the calling conventions for strcat(3).  Ideally, the
information should fit on a handful of screen pages.

Note that, in all the old Unix docs, information that didn't fit into
a man page got put in their own files; this is where we get most of
the text for BSD4.3's PS1, PS2, and SMM books.

gumby@Cygnus.COM (David V. Wallace) writes:

> 5 - info is supreme cause it's structured; man pages are hard to
>     search.

So why is it I can never, ever find the section on "$^" variables in
GNU Make without spending five minutes searching for it?  And is there
a difference between searching for a function name with your pager,
and running the Info-search command for that name because you have no
idea where the description is kept?

Interestingly enough, the GNU Binutils have Info-ized "ar", "nm",
"strip", etc., documentation.  This was done by creating the TeXinfo
equivalent of nroff man pages, then gathering them all underneath a
"binutils" info node---an approach that loses the fast lookup of man
pages, and that doesn't benefit from the organizational capabilities
of Info.  (Quickly: is "cp" in shellutils or fileutils?)  One good
point about it, though: this way it'll be easy to extract the relevant
sections and put them in their own TeXinfo man pages.

Which brings up another point: "nroff", "troff", and "*roff" don't
have a bloody thing to do with the man pages/Info argument.  They're
just an arbitrary page layout format.  There is no reason why someone
couldn't upgrade TeXinfo to do just what nroff does.  Condemning man
pages because they're written in nroff is like tossing a missive
because you don't like the looks of the messenger.


Derek
-- 
Derek Lynn Upham                                     University of Washington
sand@u.washington.edu                University Computing Services Operations
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"Ha!  Your Leaping Tiger Kung Fu is no match for my Frightened Piglet Style!"