On 5/12/26 1:18 PM, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
You haven't gone as far as some folks, who distribute man pages that
essentially say "look at the info file," but texinfo has to be there.
Before anybody starts down a road that the factual record will make them
forget, I invite anyone to review the record of my revisions to groff's
Texinfo manual. Please direct my attention to any evidence of disfavor
or lack of care relative to groff's man pages. Thanks.
Oh, I'm not saying you don't pay attention to the groff man pages -- quite
the opposite. I'm contrasting your effort with some other projects'.
I think the Info mandate strategy, or more precisely the man page
deprecation strategy, has been more successful at alienating users and
mystifying GNU software to users who are _supposed_ to enjoy the four
freedoms, including those to study and improve the software, than it has
at driving in-migration to Info and GNU Emacs where, we are to believe,
all proper/smart/right-thinking software hackers are.
I think the info format has some advantages over traditional man, and
the info program is dandy if you know emacs, but people have expectations,
and a usable man page is one of them.
That attitude is elitist, and, I claim, contrary to the FSF's and the
GNU Project's own objectives of democratizing software development.
Maybe a little, but I think it's more "we have a better way, and this is
one of the ways we're going to improve on historical Unix."
Texinfo is fine. I don't hate it. It has its place and serves the
needs of some people. (I wish it had input line continuation syntax as
flexible as *roff's, though.) What I find inappropriate is sticking a
thumb on the scales when selecting a documentation system.
People make choices, and those choices are rooted in their history. The
choice of info, and later texinfo, I argue, was based on a history that
didn't really include Unix. That's the MIT/ITS heritage coming through.
All right-thinking hackers use Emacs to develop software (probably GNU
Emacs, but oh no, not vi).[0]
In line with what I said above, I started to use emacs on Unix (before I
started writing my own) because I had used it on TOPS-20. Sometimes it's
familiarity.
All right-thinking hackers write manuals in Texinfo.
Dude, it's just a project standard. You and I and others are proof that
it doesn't have to be limiting.
For the record, I don't agree with the approach of shipping a skeletal
man page that refers you to the info document. I understand the
maintenance burden.
All right-thinking hackers run GNU/Hurd. (Void where restrictions
apply.)
I don't run Linux, and believe me, I've heard it from some people. Not so
much anymore.
I confess to some curiosity as to why FSF/GNU sponsored James Clark to
write groff in the first place when, if we retroject the attitudes of
the past 20-25 years to 1990, nobody needed troff typesetting because
TeX and nobody needed man pages because Info.[2]
I think someone realized that user capture was impossible without it.
Chet
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU [email protected] http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/
