Hi.
> Will they be happy with "info --usage"? Will you be happy with it?
While "--usage" is interesting, I don't think "info" is a good
replacemet to "man". Please note that I'm not against info: I've
always using texinfo to write my documentation and I'm a strong
supporter (and eager consumer) of info material.
The problem with "info" is that it's not as easy to use as man pages
are. I read info docs (using emacs, though, to use all of my personal
configuration) to learn things or look for strange features, but I use
man as reference material. A man page is much faster to browse, using
less. The same less you use to browse source code and configuration
files.
Info and man pages are a different approach to comprehensive
documentation, and each of them has its own merits (and its own
user-base). Info is great as an hyper-text (much much better than
html) but not as a linear and searchable reference.
> If that is not good enough, please tell why.
Hope you got my point. That's definitely not a comment against info,
which I greatly appreciate. But I still think the best thing to do is
generating both info material and manual pages from the same source,
and I'll continue doing that way. Sure this is my personal opinion,
and I don't want to force it on other developers.
Karl Berry thus replied to this note of mine:
>> Also, whenever a package includes more than executable files you need
>> man pages for several chapters, not just the exe.1.
> It is true, and those man pages have to be written by hand.
This is a point in favour of my opinion: you'd better extract manual
pages from texinfo in order to avoid writing/maintaining two copies of
the same information.
That said, my documentation is not first quality, as I'm neither an
expert in TeXinfo nor in roff. I plan to get better in texinfo,
though :)
Thanks for your patience
/alessandro
