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It all sounds great in terms of a format. But if it is so superior, how come even on the GNU “home turf” we are still mainly using man pages in 2022? Is it not
by ninjin 4y ago
It all sounds great in terms of a format. But if it is so superior, how come even on the GNU “home turf” we are still mainly using man pages in 2022? Is it not a classic example of “worse is better”? Where man may have major obvious flaws, but it is simply just good and standardised enough so that texinfo simply can not displace it despite its advantages.
- spijdar 4y agoI think it's definitely a case of "worse is better", not because it's "good enough" but because man pages are just "plain text" without the ToC or hyperlink features of texinfo. There is no interface, it's just blasted into a pager and you use the familiar interface of less or more or whatever to navigate. It's the difference between man/less showing '(press h for help or q to quit)' and Info showing 'Type H for help, h for tutorial.' I accept Info's technical superiority, but I've never intentionally used it because man/less works well enough without having to learn a new interface. (the other elephant in the room is HTML/web browsers, which I think eclipse Info in reach and familiarity so much that no-one would want to learn a secondary rich-text hyperlinked document viewer)
- somat 4y agoAn interesting tangent to this. The openbsd manual renderer (mandoc) creates less tags which can help on some of the bigger pages (ksh, pf.conf, ifconfig) An example: to get to the inet option in ifconfig, the normal '/inet' search will have a lot of false positives. but the tag ':tinet' search goes to the item in question. Nothing against gnu info pages but I always preferred man pages as it feels like less cognitive effort to use. The less tags are indicative of openbsd culture where they try to improve existing systems. linux(due to it's development model) has a tricky problem where it is very hard to improve anything. you can only create something new and abandon the old.
- SoftTalker 4y agoTIL about "less tags" This is a big help in reading openbsd docs, where they tend to put a lot in one page. For example, linux will split up the openssl man pages, one for each subcommand. OpenBSD has one page. With less as my PAGER, hitting :tx509 makes that a lot easier. Also discovered you can do this: man -O tag=x509 openssl Thanks!
- throwaway81523 4y agoOne issue is that the main info browser is in Emacs, so if you're not an Emacs user, Info pages aren't that accessible. There is a standalone info browser but it's not as nice as the Emacs one. And there are html converters but those are even worse. Back in the day, I doubt that it occurred to anyone that a lot of GNU users might someday not use Emacs. I do constantly use the Info documentation for Org-mode and a few other things, but it is observable (and annoying) that some large GNU programs like bash are documented only as man pages afaict.
- welterde 4y agoThe standalone info browser really isn't that bad and neither are the generated html page(s) (especially now that they applied some light CSS) and also the generated pdf look fairly good. GNU bash also has fairly good info documentation.
- tpoacher 4y agoI recently decided to finally spend roughly 5 minutes to learn how to navigate around info manuals. Afterwards I was like, wow, where has this been all my life??? So my answer to your question would be inertia.
- hulitu 4y agoBecause the info pages (although claimed otherwise) had the same info like man pages, with very few exceptions. And navigating info pages was a pain.