On Sun, 2023-09-24 at 02:49 +0200, Arsen Arsenović wrote: > > Many standards come and go. > > Note that I agree that a better info viewer (and a better info on-disk > format) are necessary, but groff -Tutf8 -mtty-char | less -R is not > better. It lacks the ability to navigate or reflow (the latter '.info' > also lacks today, unfortunately). > > The solution to this is not to downgrade to man-pages, but to make the > 'info' format better (the source material, i.e. the .texi, for that is > already there) and to provide a better browser. ...
Wikipedia tells us that "The Unix Programmer's Manual was first published on November 3, 1971. The first actual man pages were written by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at the insistence of their manager Doug McIlroy in 1971." GNU Info is a de facto documentation standard for UNIX-like operating systems in the same way that GNU Hurd is a de facto kernel standard for UNIX-like operating systems - which is to say, not at all. Forcing the user to "jump through hoops" - "Full documentation ... available locally via: info ..." - to gain a reasonable overview of the coreutils system commands is little more than a juvenile disparaging of the traditional Unix Manual. As for Info itself, I will always use "zless /usr/share/info/coreutils.info.gz", rather than "info '(coreutils) rm invocation'", just to avoid dealing with info's arcane navigation commands. Arguments about the de facto documentation standard for UNIX-like operating systems is not going to be resolved here and now, and adding a couple of sentences to coreutils/man/rm.x is not a big ask.
