On 03/21/2017 09:24 AM, Harald Dunkel wrote: > Hi folks, > > I highly appreciate your work to provide excellent tools for > decades. > > There is one thing I would like to ask for, though: Would you > mind to support "full" man pages instead of the "full-docu-can- > be-found-in-info-or-on-the-web-only" pages (e.g. dd(1), cpio(1))? > > Advantages: > > - no break in your regular workflow, regardless on which > unix-like system you are logged in or which man page you > try to access > > - no page breaks, but full documentation on a single page. > Its very easy to navigate. > > - focused on providing the information. The user interface > is provided by more or less, common to other tools. > > I am not asking you to drop the info pages, of course, but IMHO > keeping things simple and the DOTADIW approach should still be > considered as a major feature of Unix-like systems.
First of all, the Texinfo manual is the primary way for documentation in GNU projects: https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/GNU-Manuals.html#GNU-Manuals Second, maintaining the same as man pages is redundant work. Therefore, we choose to generate the man pages from "--help" output. https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Man-Pages.html Re. "nice" and "printouts" (mentioned by Reuti): what's wrong with the HTML (one page or single node format), ASCII, DVI or PDF formats? https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/ So after all: while the advantages may be tempting, the effort to keep texinfo and man in sync is too high for coreutils. Consider the mess in findutils: some information exists in the man page, while other is in the Texinfo manual. Not useful either. Have a nice day, Berny
