17 Sep
2019
17 Sep
'19
3:54 a.m.
Larry McVoy writes:
I think, someone correct me if I'm wrong, the info stuff was designed
to handle larger, more complex stuff, with a table of contents, etc.
Something like perl could fit in one info doc but the perl man page is
not a thing, it's just a series of pointers to more man pages.
Can't answer you directly on this one, but I prefer the old system of
having man pages and separate documents for longer things. I still
have old notebooks full of papers on lex, yacc, and so on.
One of the problems with using info for something like perl is that it
doesn't have a useful organization. There's a difference to me between
a reference manual and a user's guide. Most of the stuff referenced by
the main perl page is user's guide stuff to me, it's not a reference.
Probably someone knows more than me about all this. I have always been
under the impression that one read the user's guide to learn about
complicated stuff. The manual pages were there so that you could find
the right options when you forgot. Putting every detail about a complex
program into a manual page doesn't feel right to me.
Jon