> My theory is that GNU tools were so bloated by design that they > realized that they couldn't write a decent man page for their tools > so they invented the info pages and the --help flag.
In fairness to info, you have to consider its history. The want was to be able to present an online edition of some large documents (the emacs documentation), with cross-references, search capabilities, index lookups, etc. This was long before the web was even a glimmer in anyone's eye. In that regard, it was a spectacular success. Being able to jump around a 400+page document in real time on a VT100 plugged into a Sun 3/50 workstation is a testament to that. The standalone implementation suffers from being keystroke compatible with the emacs lisp implementation. Those of us who grep up on emacs can find our way around. For anyone else, I can't imagine how they manage to use it. But as others have said, treating info as a replacement for man pages is arrogance beyond any rational description. Then again, the quality of documentation for most GNU software matches that of the code. --lyndon
