On Tue, 30 Jun 2020 03:08:04 +1000 "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> wrote:
> At 2020-06-14T14:40:44+1000, John Gardner wrote: > > Why are we using Info, again? Was it because of GNU policy? > > Yes. https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#GNU-Manuals > > Aside from the mandate of the source document format, I find the > advice there fairly sound, as far as it goes. I don't think the "mandate" has any force. What are they going to do, kick us out? I suggest we drop texinfo when the same output can be produced with groff. That means HTML and, if you ask me, a better viewer than GNU less(1). Texinfo was invented to replace man pages. groff was invented to (among other things) preserve them. I guess we could call that "philosophical tension". Of the two, I'd say groff has been far more successful, whether you count documents or pages or users. (Strangely enough, my Ubuntu system lacks a texinfo file for texinfo. "info texinfo" turns up a ... man page.) The in-terminal experience of info files is about as bad as it gets. The info reader's sole strength is links, especially index links. The UI is otherwise hideous. I don't think there's a better word for it. texinfo is therefore -- even in that document's own estimation -- best treated as a source format, as a markup language. On that basis, how is it superior to groff? texinfo produces better HTML. Unlike man and mdoc, texinfo has hyperlinks and floating displays. groff has the advantage at the command line, which is why (I suppose) bash dropped info in favor of a man page. For our purposes, texinfo will be obsolete the day groff documentation in HTML is of similar quality to that produced by texinfo. IMHO, GNU has no reason to object, given groff's inherent purpose as a project. Beyond that, I have long thought that, as a matter of perception and acceptance, the one thing holding groff back is how man pages are typically viewed, i.e., though nroff and the pager. Nothing says 1980 like a monospaced font on a VT-100, where the mouse becomes inert and cross references have to be typed in. There is no GUI application specialized for viewing man pages. There is ditroff and xman; there are PDF viewers and web browsers. But there's nothing so quick as "man foo" to bring up a man page. That's why man(1) has endured, and why decades-long efforts to replace it have failed. A convenient GUI viewer -- with hyperlinks and proportional fonts -- would "advertise" groff and cement its position as the best free documenation system there is, bar none. --jkl
