Ken Stevens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> Mostly I love arch, however (and I know it was done by design, but I
> disagree with that portion) I used and miss the whole info thing,
> especially within emacs. Is there a semi-easy way for me to add the
> info stuff back in to my installation of arch?

This was discussed last spring:

http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch/2005-April/004215.html

http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch/2005-April/004220.html

At the time I wrote a pkgbuild for pinfo, a very nice viewer suggested
by Jaroslaw Swierczynski.  pinfo will present a nicely formatted man
page (with bolded headings) if there's no info file.  I could
contribute it if there is interest.

http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch/2005-April/004233.html

Summarizing, man pages aren't useful for complex applications like
gcc, emacs, and cvs, which need a book to document their use.  The
man page for gcc is 200 screens!  Hypertext is needed, and that's
what the Texinfo system provides.

The Texinfo system produces a typeset book, html docs, and the info
file from the same source, so it's easy to maintain large docs.

OTOH, info isn't great for small programs largely because the authors
don't follow a standard outline and the standard info reader produces
an ugly output (unlike pinfo).

Unfortunately, the discussion went nowhere.  It seemed to depend
on what Judd's current view was/is:

http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch/2005-April/004235.html

-- 
KBK

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