20 Nov
2018
20 Nov
'18
1:10 p.m.
On Mon, Nov 19, 2018 at 11:52:38PM -0700, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
I'd like to mention mandoc. It takes mdoc or man pages and produces
output in various formats. See e.g. http://man.openbsd.org/mandoc. The
formatting and links are derived from the semantic info in the source
pages.x
-Otto
I think that's somewhat backwards in he
spirit of 'UNIX'... the man and
info pages should reference the manual in /usr/doc/foo/
The goal for Info was to *be* the equivalent of /usr/doc/foo. Along the
way the default for Info changed to go to the 'invoking' section of a
manual so that you saw the options, arguably the most immediately
useful part of a man page, attempting to give the user the best of both
worlds.
All that said, I think this topic has been beaten to death. Info
did not successfully replace man pages. As a file format, I think
that Info has very little left to offer.
What I do *love* is the Texinfo markup language, which is wonderful
for producing book-style documents. And what's nice is that a
single input file can produce PDF, HTML and DocBook (as well as Info).
Arnold