20 Sep
2017
20 Sep
'17
8:15 p.m.
I fear this thread drifted from Jon's point about improving a tool, instead
of replacing it.
On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 1:01 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote:
OK, here's another one that's good for chest
thumping...
I am not a fan of texinfo. It doesn't provide any benefits (to me) over
man.
Amen...
To me this was just rms trying to inflict ITS/emacs on Unix. Lars points
out info is just ITS format, the tool is just emacs commands.
The key was that here was a case where the UNIX solution (man) was
perfectly reasonable, worked very well. But it was not the likely and in
the right flavor of rms.
This is a systemic problem. I have a section in my
book-in-progress where
I
talk about being a "good programming citizen". One of the things that I
say
is:
Often there is a tool that does most of what you need but is lacking
some feature or other. Add that feature to the existing tool;
don't just write a new one. The problem with writing a new one
is that, as a tool user, you end up having to learn a lot of tools
that perform essentially the same function. It's a waste of time
an energy. A good example is the make utility (invented by Stuart
Feldman at Bell Labs in 1976) that is used to build large software
packages. As time went on, new features were needed. Some were
added to make, but many other incompatible utilities were created that
performed similar functions. Don't create burdens for others.
Improve existing tools if possible.
Which is exactly your point. I think you are spot on here. Instead of
rms trying to learn to use Unix the way, he inflicted the ITS/emacs way
because he thought it was ``better.'' Which is a tad arrogant.
I have noted that the folks that don't mind and/or like info, are regular
emacs users.
Someone like me, who can use emacs, but does not find it the only thing (I
could switch between RPN - HP style and algebraic - TI calculators too),
just find texinfo to be an annoyance. It's different and one extra place
to look. As Jon said, it does not provide any benefits and in fact is a
detraction because it means the standard Unix tools like apropros does not
index it.
Larry has right idea, with his webroff. Make html when it is appropriate
I also think, man pages are man pages and not user manuals. The Perl
example was classic. We did not learn C from the man page. What we got
in the C man page was how to run it. There was a manual (doc) for the
language. That should have been a manual (in -ms macros) and then run
through Larry's webroff and properly indexed.
Then you get everything.
Clem