Re: [Groff] Re: Introduction

[Alejandro López-Valencia]

On 10/24/05, Keith MARSHALL wrote:
> [Concerning the availability of man vs. info pages]
>
> D. E. Evans wrote:
> > I agree.  However, as a GNU program, GNU users are going to
> > automatically look at info, not man...
>
> Says who?  I'm a GNU/Linux user, and I will go for the man page
> first, every time.
>
> As others have said, it is intensely irritating to say `man foo',
> only to be referred to an info document.  Even more irritating to
> be referred to an info document for more information, only to find
> there a verbatim copy of what I've just read in the man page, with
> nothing added, or to say `info bar', to be told "no info on bar",
> and then be presented with a manpage, but having to use info's
> interface to peruse it.
>

I agree with Keith. On the one hand I find that texinfo is an
excellent means to write technical documentation with TeX (it is much
better than LaTeX in that respect, but I take mm instead anyday), but
as a replacement to man pages failed and it did it 15 years ago
already. What I find puzzling is that once upon a time there was a
texi2man package and it even showed up in the texinfo distribution. I
wonder what happened to that.

Has anyone noticed that most man pages in a GNU/Linux system have been
written by members of the Debian Documentation Team? Even those of
official GNU software? I bow to them.

--
Alejandro López-Valencia