Manoj Srivastava <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Sat, Feb 21, 1998 at 10:37:15PM -0600: > Who needs to pull up emacs to read info pages? there is a > stand alone info, which is faster than lynx, and has way > better search capabilities than either lynx or "less".
Info is better suited for certain information storage functions. Certain programs don't need the nodal, heirarchial nature of info, and would IMO be better served by a man page; some are on the borderline (like bash) and some are just obviously better suited to the info format (like libc). The searching functions in info aren't really better...it's just that the nature of info pages allows delimiting, whereas man is a straight line and if you start searching at top, and don't already know a unique keyword to search for, you'll end up looking through many bogus hits. Either that, or try to find the appropriate section yourself, which generally involved skimming until you find it. Using info, you simply traverse nodes and can arrive at destinations more quickly. Info is not without its problems either -- 80-column pages for one; lack of bold characters; no convenient vi keys, to name a few. There is also an annoying habit of the top node (dir) to be broken, have duplicate entries, or obsolete entries. I think that a man page which says "read the info page instead" is entirely sufficient; while this may not be the user's preference, the maintainer nonetheless provides all the necessary documentation; it's just in a format that some people don't like. But at least the Unix convention of "man blah" will still hold in that you will be pointed to a source of more information. And since a Linux/GNU system uses a vast quantity of GNU stuff -- this is just going to have to be dealt with. You cannot please everyone. Alternatively, info could have functionality added, or could front-end for man pages, or the reverse. Nodal man would be very nice; still using ?roff macros and such to format output, but using the less pager, and containing tags and such to traverse nodes. Instead of a central "top" node (useful for indexing/apropos), there would still be singular man pages in appropriate man sections. They would contain tags and such so that the man database updates could handle all the dirty work. Dunno, I use man-1.5, not man_db :) And info when it's appropriate. -- Scott
