[email protected] writes: > On Wed, Apr 05, 2023 at 12:11:44PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote: >> > Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2023 11:03:36 +0200 >> > From: [email protected] >> > Cc: [email protected] >> > >> > I was dreaming of a world where both doc systems converge >> > in a way their respective users don't notice [...] > >> The future is already here: just use Texinfo manuals for everything. > > Not the one I dreamt of. No TLDP man pages. No kernel.org docs.
kernel.org docs are written in a format that is quite similar to Texinfo, that is rST, and offer little advantage over Texinfo-generated HTML (at least advantage that can't be reconciled), with the disadvantage of not being accessible via standard GNU means, so I don't see why they would be excluded from such a world. WRT to TLDP man pages, I doubt they'd be found obsolete, as they are an excellent reference. There's a place for man, that TLDP fits well, but it's limited to small-form text due to using pagers and lacking links and hierarchical structure. For instance, an info document for the standard C I/O facilities could cover far broader concepts than the pages for fwrite, fread, fputs, fscanf, ... individually do. > Excludes those accustomed to the man page interface (you may > dislike it all you want). Writing alternative Info viewers is a relatively easy task, it has been done before (pinfo, info2html, and probably others I don't recall), so I don't see why a viewer accustomed to ones workflow is a contradiction. > Annihilating the others is a strange way to make peace. Besides, > in this case, it won't happen. I don't think that was the intention. man pages have a clear purpose in a GNU system: providing a quick reference for the typical use case, akin to --help. This is what the format is suitable for, after all, and larger and more complex manual pages (like those of Bash) demonstrate why it's unsuitable in general (ad-hoc regex search is simply unsuitable for searching long-form text, indices are an essential feature, and are the primary reason why I bothered getting acclimated to info-stnd in the first place). I've heard that some have started summarizing man pages as 'tldr pages' or such. That might be a familiar analogue from the real world. > Cheers Have a lovely day! -- Arsen Arsenović
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