3 ms·

Wow, no love for info?

chousuke 6y ago
What does info add over plain old manual pages? I honestly don't really know, since I usually forget that info even exists. I feel like the effort the GNU project put into creating a competing standard for documentation would have been better spent improving the tooling around the standard man page mechanisms instead.
- alex_smart 6y ago
  >What does info add over plain old manual pages? I feel like info pages are more suitable for explaining the features of larger pieces of software. Can you imagine what a mess the man page for emacs would be, if it were to try to explain all its functionality? Instead the man page of emacs only gives a brief description of the software and explains the command line options and all the functionality is explained in an info document. I think of info as an alternative to /usr/share/doc, not man pages. The most import features of info that are missing from man: 1. pagination 2. cross-referencing 3. structure
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  There is some truly great info-based documentation. The GNU AWK User Guide comes to mind: https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html There's alot of information in there that is not in the manpage. (I'm painfully aware of this as I tend to rely mostly on the manpage, and learn things every time (which is rare) I read the GNU docs.) At the same time, the info interface and navigation remain completely opaque and nonintuitive to me.
dredmorbius 6y ago
The genius of man is that it uses any standard system pager, and so the navigation semantics (admittedly simple) are clear. Info uses a dedicated document viewer, which, unless you use that frequently is novel and ideosycratic when used. (This can be changed, but more painfully than with man.) Info is a hypertext documentation system admittedly. It happens to have been invented pretty much simultaneously with another you may have heard of, the World Wide Web. A system with slightly greater user familiarity. And Free Software implementations. Debian's 'dwww' is an interesting marriage of multiple docuentation formats. It presents manpages, info pages, Debian package information, and additional documentation, all categorised and indexed, and accessible through a web browser from your local system. Including, as it happens, console mode browsers (lynx, w3m, elinks, links2, etc.). Which tends to amp up and standardise access to all of the above. dwww is the one thing which makes info actually useful. Which is a shame as there really is some quite good info documentation, it's just buried under what is for most people, an impenetrable interface.
- alex_smart 5y ago
  In what way is info's interface "impenetrable"? It takes two minutes to look up its keybindings, most of which happen to be mnemonic: h-help, n-next, p-previous, u-up, l-last, q-quit, space-scroll down, shift+space-scroll up, tab-next link, shift+tab-prev link. You probably wouldn't ever need anything more than these 10 keybindings.

What does info add over plain old manual pages? I honestly don't really know, since I usually forget that info even exists. I feel like the effort the GNU project put into creating a competing standard for documentation would have been better spent improving the tooling around the standard man page mechanisms instead.

alex_smart 6y ago
>What does info add over plain old manual pages? I feel like info pages are more suitable for explaining the features of larger pieces of software. Can you imagine what a mess the man page for emacs would be, if it were to try to explain all its functionality? Instead the man page of emacs only gives a brief description of the software and explains the command line options and all the functionality is explained in an info document. I think of info as an alternative to /usr/share/doc, not man pages. The most import features of info that are missing from man: 1. pagination 2. cross-referencing 3. structure
dredmorbius 6y ago
There is some truly great info-based documentation. The GNU AWK User Guide comes to mind: https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html There's alot of information in there that is not in the manpage. (I'm painfully aware of this as I tend to rely mostly on the manpage, and learn things every time (which is rare) I read the GNU docs.) At the same time, the info interface and navigation remain completely opaque and nonintuitive to me.

dredmorbius 6y ago

The genius of man is that it uses any standard system pager, and so the navigation semantics (admittedly simple) are clear. Info uses a dedicated document viewer, which, unless you use that frequently is novel and ideosycratic when used. (This can be changed, but more painfully than with man.) Info is a hypertext documentation system admittedly. It happens to have been invented pretty much simultaneously with another you may have heard of, the World Wide Web. A system with slightly greater user familiarity. And Free Software implementations. Debian's 'dwww' is an interesting marriage of multiple docuentation formats. It presents manpages, info pages, Debian package information, and additional documentation, all categorised and indexed, and accessible through a web browser from your local system. Including, as it happens, console mode browsers (lynx, w3m, elinks, links2, etc.). Which tends to amp up and standardise access to all of the above. dwww is the one thing which makes info actually useful. Which is a shame as there really is some quite good info documentation, it's just buried under what is for most people, an impenetrable interface.

alex_smart 5y ago
In what way is info's interface "impenetrable"? It takes two minutes to look up its keybindings, most of which happen to be mnemonic: h-help, n-next, p-previous, u-up, l-last, q-quit, space-scroll down, shift+space-scroll up, tab-next link, shift+tab-prev link. You probably wouldn't ever need anything more than these 10 keybindings.