On Sunday 01 January 2017 06:36:51 Xen wrote: > Thomas Schmitt schreef op 31-12-2016 11:59: > > Well, "info" is the pet of GNU and thus often better documentation > > for GNU tools than their "man" pages. > > The goal and viewpoint is nevertheless the same: Technical > > documentation > > of programs, not tutorial. > > I personally also cannot use "info". I have tried many times in the > past. Always gave up pretty quickly. Just unusable to me. > > I would need to study a tutorial on how to use info and I don't even > want to. > > > The reason why many large man pages or info documents are so hard to > > grasp is really in the difference of viewpoints. Too much background > > knowledge and too exotic programmer's motivations, i assume. > > Yes exactly. You are assumed to already know the program when you > start reading the man page. > > You are assumed to know everything the programmer knows. This is the > "Linux is easy" fallacy that originates from people forgetting how > long it took them to acquire some knowledge, and now they think it was > easy all this time for them, but they had to become familiar with it > at first as well. > > For example, if you are new to LVM, and you are in some rescue mode > that doesn't automatically activate your volume groups, doing > "vgchange -ay" is not that intuitive. "man lvm" is also not helpful. > You will first need to find the required command (vgchange) before you > can get any help, but you don't know that you need that one because > you don't feel you want to change the vg, you only want to activate > it. This can quickly elude you for some time and especially if you are > in a pinch and suffering already, you may not have the time and mental > capacity for it. You are trying to rescue your system and cannot find > the tool to do it with, but you don't have internet so you can't look > it up and..... > > Then some fool will later day: "Why don't you just do vgchange -ay?" > And if you then say "Well that is not that easy to know" they will say > "man vgchange" "easy". > > > Nevertheless i suffer like most other people when i have to study > > foreign > > technical docs for the first time. > > So it is not dumb user versus smart programmer but rather insider > > versus > > newcommer. > > Yes, exactly.
As far as "info" goes, its pretty opaque and unusable. A much better info file reader is pinfo. At least it has a consistent navigation response to the key presses given it. But my pet peeve is the man page that refers you to the info pages, and the info page is an exact copy/paste of the man page. So I find NO plausible reason for the existence of the whole duplicate info pages. If it was going to be an expanded format, it might be worth its disk space. But I cannot recall ever seeing a more complete information about anything I ever looked up, telling me something that wasn't in the man page. Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
