On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 12:45 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
Yeah, except they didn't create their own city, they pooped all over a
different one. 
peed vs. pooped -  one is marking territory while the other is destroying it.
It is interesting that both analogs work here, however.

There is no defense for what they did.  If they did the
right thing they would have created a markup language that could have
produced info files and man files.
+1 and that's why it is even more difficult to understand.   Being polite and 'fitting in' would really not been any harder than being like Jon's father-in-law.
 
....
Those who defend the choice of info over man just aren't real Unix people.
I'd maybe say it as they don't want to be real Unix people and fit it with the rest.

 
And that's fine, Unix isn't the only choice, they can go
run some other OS and be happy. 
Frankly, trying to turn a Lisp Machine into a "Unix box" would have been as much of sin, in my eyes. Hey, I'm thrilled to see rms and his friends can build and purchase as many LMI box as he would like (But I do observe, the 'technically superior system,' in the end, wasn't very economical).   I really don't mind bringing things over (like more, or job control, or command/filename completion that all came from other systems).  That is really adding value to the new system (UNIX in this case). 


But it's just rude to thrust info
into a Unix system.  And lame because they could have parsed man
pages into info docs and then they are adopting the Unix way of
doing things and actually adding value.
touché 

As Larry and Jon have said better than I, it was the seemly effect of trying to replace man with info that I just don't understand.     As Larry has said if they had made a way go from texinfo to man, even if it had been a little rough on the edges, I might have grumbled, but I would have tried to use it.  The truth is today, like many other Unix hacker I know, if I am offered a new tool but using it means that I am being led down a path to use info/texinfo, I rethink if I want to use that new tool or not.   It's a big turn off for me to want to learn to use such a tool since I know the authors have made no attempt to integrate it into a traditional UNIX workflow if they have not built proper man pages, much less written traditional docs.