On Mon, Aug 21, 2000 at 01:01:37PM +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Man pages are an obsolete way of providing inforamtion. They are not
> designed with hyperlinking in mind and are unsuitable for long texts.
> In addition they are based on groff and thus they are far inferior for
> printing to the TeX based-info pages (the texinfo pages are in fact
> TeX pages who are converted to info pages by the texinfo program).
<rant>
I, as an administrator, want "man xyz" to present information about
xyz. That the underlying software has not been updated for ages is not
my concern -- thats your (the software developers) problem. Nobody
prevented you from extending man with support for hyperlinks, replace
groff or provide a decent pager (instead of more/less). Its gross
arrogance to assume that users will want to learn a new way of getting
information every other year for no other reason than that the authors
don't like the old anymore -- for reasons which they have to account
for themselves.
</rant>
Ok, calming down: texinfo has never catched on outside of the GNU area
apart from very few exceptions. Thats largely due to the
unfriendliness of the accompanying software and also due to the fact
that the underlying technology is almost as old as groff is -- ok, it
can do hypertext. Thats all it has to offer.
In the meantime, SGML/XML came along and took the world by storm --
because their semantic encoding is something new and usefull. The
accompanying software is great (and available from lots of different
parties) and it even supports old legacy formats like groff-mandoc in
one fell swoop. Now, thats are *good* reasons to change the format.
---Ingo Luetkebohle / 21st Century Digital Boy
its easy to stop using Perl: I do it after every project
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