18 Feb
2020
18 Feb
'20
3:16 a.m.
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 thats 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.