On Mon, Feb 17, 2020 at 3:51 PM Thomas Paulsen <thomas.paulsen(a)firemail.de>
wrote:
Like Clem, I
prefer concise man pages and longer, separate documents for
those programs where it
makes sense. I consider man pages to be quick
references.
reasonable.
I write all my quick references in plain nroff since many years. There are
gui editors, gui viewers, and lots of cgi search engines && web viewers
even with hyperlinks. Even under good ole emacs techinfo is redundant, as
'woman' can do hyperlinks, which were the only advantage of techinfo in a
remote past, however time goes on. Today we have help2man, hence the lazy
ones can do man pages too.
'The problem is that the ecosystem has been fragmented by people doing
their "documentation" in their preferred formats instead of in a common
(man) format. This makes the experience one of "is there any
documentation?" followed by "what's the incantation to get it?" When
you're
looking for the documentation for pdf2svg, for example, and there is no man
page, how long does it take to figure out that there is no documentation at
all? '
that's true. In the early 90ths they forced us writing quick references
with .html. Big confusion. Soon later I found myself converting .html back
into nroff because that's the UNIX style.
I know some of us don't like to hear that, but with regards to the gnu
tool chain, Richard did a lot of good things, however the politics of
replacing man by techinfo definitely wasn't.
I think this showed the wisdom of deleting binaries from /usr/bin when
there was no man page for them...
Warner