Ipswitch wrote:
>
> On Mon, 5 Jul 1999, Brad wrote:
>
> > > the documentation is incomplete, out of date, or simply wrong,
> >
> > You have a bit of a point there. Some of the HOWTOs are rather old and
> > inaccurate, mostly because they were written a few years ago and there've
> > been many advances since then. Most of the manpages on the other hand are
> > relatively up-to-date, and many of the more complicated packages even come
> > with examples (look in /usr/doc/[packagename]).
>
> The GNU manpages are really bad. Most just tell you that you shouldn't use
> them - use info instead. Yuck!
Yes, I don't know why GNU chose to do this to the community. It
seems everyone at GNU uses (X)emacs, since emacs reads info stuff
but they never considered the rest of us who might prefer another
editor that doesn't support info. The stand alone info reader
they provide as an afterthought is truly horrible. However, there
is a replacement (finally!) called 'pinfo'. It has not reached
v1.0 yet, so it should still be considered 'beta', but it works
very well for me. It is colorized, allows the use of the arrow
keys in an intuitive way, and can show both info *and* man pages
(it checks for an info file first, if not found it will look for a
man page). The info-like node linking ability works on properly
written man pages too (hilighted references to other programs
become a link in pinfo).
--
Ed C.
