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Tangential, but can someone explain the dichotomy of man pages vs info pages? Are they competitors, complements? Seems like many tools, like find, have sectio

Tangential, but can someone explain the dichotomy of man pages vs info pages? Are they competitors, complements? Seems like many tools, like find, have sections for both. Seems like man pages get all the love. Google searches often result in man page results, but not info pages. Can someone educate me? Thank you :)

bombcar 3y ago
GNU tried to push everything to info pages (a simple hyperlink browser) and it backfired spectacularly. Because man was simple, info was confusing and complicated and annoying.
- JdeBP 3y ago
 The irony is that Daniel J. Bernstein said in the late 1990s that switching to HTML is the answer. And here we are, almost a quarter of a century later: Most of the people claiming that they are reading manual pages are actually reading HTML documents with WWW browsers. (All of the people following the hyperlinks to man pages found in this very discussion are doing that, for example.) * https://cr.yp.to/slashdoc.html https://cr.yp.to/slashdoc.html Strictly speaking it's not advocating HTML, but "browser-compatible" documents, which in fact includes DocBook XML.
 - bombcar 3y ago
 I feel the real key is having it in a separate window/terminal - I remember a TSR for Dos that would drop down a half window with command help - and you could scroll it AND still work on your command line with special modifier keys. We do that now with a browser window open as we enter commands.
 - JdeBP 3y ago
 tmux and screen users would say that one can use the roff-based man system and still do that. The key is, rather, in what M. Bernstein wrote: "Much more effort has gone into web browsers than into roff readers." And this is true. I just recently fixed a bug in a 2018-ish man command that prevented it from displaying Japanese manual pages, because it defaulted to 7-bit ASCII instead of UTF-8. Any WWW browser that couldn't have handled UTF-8 in 2018 would have been junked by most people. That sort of stuff was fixed years before for WWW browsers. Indeed, there's been the reverse process going on. The effort that has gone into roff readers has sometimes even been actively suppressed. Did you know that your manual pages actually contain italics for emphasis and denoting certain syntactical elements, and have done pretty much all along? groff got the ability to display them, like troff originally could, long ago, as well as colour; but these abilities have been explicitly disabled in most operating systems. We'd laugh at WWW browsers that couldn't do all of and and and suchlike, or (of course) their CSS equivalents. But we suppress the ability of free software roff readers to reinstate what Unix text processing could likewise actually do in the 1970s.
 - bombcar 3y ago
 Part of the reason the Gentoo wiki/docs are so good is that they use color and links - both totally doable in text mode consoles, but both neglected.
 - dredmorbius 3y ago
 And there are tools such as Debian's dwww (<https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/dwww https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/dwww>) which present virtually all local system information through a Web interface, also queryable through shell tools.[1] Both man and info pages (as well as numerous other document formats) are presented as Web pages, making info's distinction between man and hypertext formats largely irrelevant. Note that this is a case of Debian's packaging conventions, standards, and requirements, as well as the wealth of available packages (including many documentation packages) being leveraged with a small additional bit of glue package to provide a fantastic utility. As concerns man and info: I prefer manpages for their simplicity, use of ubiquitous tools and pagers (info by default relies on its own idiosyncratic viewer programme which I can never remember how to use or navigate, though you can bypass this for other tools). Info pages can offer richer documentation in more detail, in instances, though I find that generally HTML would be preferable for this. Note that both info and the WWW were invented within about five minutes of each other. Well, a few months, at any rate. Stallman really should acknowledge the clear winner here, as info's idiosyncrasies very much hurt rather than help it. ________________________________ Notes: 1. That is, in addition to man and info pages, you can point your browser at <https://localhost/dwww/ https://localhost/dwww/> to see the content. You'll also get the /usr/share/doc/<packagename> trees, any installed manuals, auxiliary package information, and access to installed documentation such as RFCs, Linux Gazette, and other sources, if you've chosen to install those as well. Search is via swish++. Presentation can be limited to the localhost interface only (that is, only users on that system can view the docs) or opened up to specified IP ranges.
toast0 3y ago
At some point, seems like in the late 90s, but who knows, the GNU project decided man pages weren't good enough, and tried to switch to info pages. As far as I can tell, nobody ever figured out how to use the info pages, and eventually either the GNU project relented and put the information back into the man pages, or the distributions did it for them. Info pages are supposed to be better because the different sections are hyperlinked or something, but as I recall, man info was useless and so was info info, so I never learned how to use it. :P
imd 3y ago
man comes from Unix, info comes from Emacs and maybe the OSes it was developed on. The GNU project also comes from that ecosystem, so even their drop-in replacements for the original Unix tools have info pages.
- floren 3y ago
  Specifically, info appears to come from ITS. Stallman hacked on ITS back in the day, and the first time I logged into an ITS system (http://up.dfupdate.se/ http://up.dfupdate.se/, if you're curious) and used the online help system, I suddenly realized why GNU was always trying to foist this weird manpage alternative on us. (I remember back when I first got into Linux, like early 2000s, it seemed like a lot of the core GNU man pages were just stubs that said "For documentation, use the info system". Luckily they seem to have backtracked on that?)

bombcar 3y ago

GNU tried to push everything to info pages (a simple hyperlink browser) and it backfired spectacularly. Because man was simple, info was confusing and complicated and annoying.

JdeBP 3y ago
The irony is that Daniel J. Bernstein said in the late 1990s that switching to HTML is the answer. And here we are, almost a quarter of a century later: Most of the people claiming that they are reading manual pages are actually reading HTML documents with WWW browsers. (All of the people following the hyperlinks to man pages found in this very discussion are doing that, for example.) * https://cr.yp.to/slashdoc.html https://cr.yp.to/slashdoc.html Strictly speaking it's not advocating HTML, but "browser-compatible" documents, which in fact includes DocBook XML.
- bombcar 3y ago
 I feel the real key is having it in a separate window/terminal - I remember a TSR for Dos that would drop down a half window with command help - and you could scroll it AND still work on your command line with special modifier keys. We do that now with a browser window open as we enter commands.
 - JdeBP 3y ago
 tmux and screen users would say that one can use the roff-based man system and still do that. The key is, rather, in what M. Bernstein wrote: "Much more effort has gone into web browsers than into roff readers." And this is true. I just recently fixed a bug in a 2018-ish man command that prevented it from displaying Japanese manual pages, because it defaulted to 7-bit ASCII instead of UTF-8. Any WWW browser that couldn't have handled UTF-8 in 2018 would have been junked by most people. That sort of stuff was fixed years before for WWW browsers. Indeed, there's been the reverse process going on. The effort that has gone into roff readers has sometimes even been actively suppressed. Did you know that your manual pages actually contain italics for emphasis and denoting certain syntactical elements, and have done pretty much all along? groff got the ability to display them, like troff originally could, long ago, as well as colour; but these abilities have been explicitly disabled in most operating systems. We'd laugh at WWW browsers that couldn't do all of and and and suchlike, or (of course) their CSS equivalents. But we suppress the ability of free software roff readers to reinstate what Unix text processing could likewise actually do in the 1970s.
 - bombcar 3y ago
 Part of the reason the Gentoo wiki/docs are so good is that they use color and links - both totally doable in text mode consoles, but both neglected.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
 And there are tools such as Debian's dwww (<https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/dwww https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/dwww>) which present virtually all local system information through a Web interface, also queryable through shell tools.[1] Both man and info pages (as well as numerous other document formats) are presented as Web pages, making info's distinction between man and hypertext formats largely irrelevant. Note that this is a case of Debian's packaging conventions, standards, and requirements, as well as the wealth of available packages (including many documentation packages) being leveraged with a small additional bit of glue package to provide a fantastic utility. As concerns man and info: I prefer manpages for their simplicity, use of ubiquitous tools and pagers (info by default relies on its own idiosyncratic viewer programme which I can never remember how to use or navigate, though you can bypass this for other tools). Info pages can offer richer documentation in more detail, in instances, though I find that generally HTML would be preferable for this. Note that both info and the WWW were invented within about five minutes of each other. Well, a few months, at any rate. Stallman really should acknowledge the clear winner here, as info's idiosyncrasies very much hurt rather than help it. ________________________________ Notes: 1. That is, in addition to man and info pages, you can point your browser at <https://localhost/dwww/ https://localhost/dwww/> to see the content. You'll also get the /usr/share/doc/<packagename> trees, any installed manuals, auxiliary package information, and access to installed documentation such as RFCs, Linux Gazette, and other sources, if you've chosen to install those as well. Search is via swish++. Presentation can be limited to the localhost interface only (that is, only users on that system can view the docs) or opened up to specified IP ranges.

toast0 3y ago

At some point, seems like in the late 90s, but who knows, the GNU project decided man pages weren't good enough, and tried to switch to info pages. As far as I can tell, nobody ever figured out how to use the info pages, and eventually either the GNU project relented and put the information back into the man pages, or the distributions did it for them. Info pages are supposed to be better because the different sections are hyperlinked or something, but as I recall, man info was useless and so was info info, so I never learned how to use it. :P

imd 3y ago

man comes from Unix, info comes from Emacs and maybe the OSes it was developed on. The GNU project also comes from that ecosystem, so even their drop-in replacements for the original Unix tools have info pages.

floren 3y ago
Specifically, info appears to come from ITS. Stallman hacked on ITS back in the day, and the first time I logged into an ITS system (http://up.dfupdate.se/ http://up.dfupdate.se/, if you're curious) and used the online help system, I suddenly realized why GNU was always trying to foist this weird manpage alternative on us. (I remember back when I first got into Linux, like early 2000s, it seemed like a lot of the core GNU man pages were just stubs that said "For documentation, use the info system". Luckily they seem to have backtracked on that?)