3 ms·

> info pages are hierarchical Hierarchies aren't All That. The case for hierarchies only makes sense when the ontology is familiar to the user[1]. Without kno

> info pages are hierarchical Hierarchies aren't All That. The case for hierarchies only makes sense when the ontology is familiar to the user[1]. Without knowing the info hierarchy it's impossible to navigate. Why, for example, are the gnupg info pages under 'GNU Utilities', wget under 'Network applications', and things like rm and mkdir under 'Individual utilities' (a long with dozens of other things)? 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20070119210402/http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070119210402/http://www.shirky...

klodolph 3y ago
The hierarchy within the info page is where it’s useful. You don’t look for gnupg by going into GNU Utilities, you go to gnupg by typing "info gnupg". Within the gnupg manual you can look at a section like “key management commands” or something like that. There are a lot of different commands in gnupg, it’s nice to have a separate page for each, and be able to browse. By comparison, the OpenSSL docs are man pages, and it kinda sucks to browse the OpenSSL docs. (I’m gonna say, categorically, that both OpenSSL and GnuPG have bad UX. It kinda sucks to figure out what you’re doing in either case, but at least the GnuPG manual is easier to read.)