info was only ever a Gnu thing, and there are as many people who'd do
the opposite of what the FSF would say on principle. A major strike
against info is its reliance on texinfo, its own weird markup language.
texinfo also has dependencies that run into the gigabytes, since
installing texinfo will also install TeX Live, the now-vast TeX system
for Linux.
tbh, I'm surprised that something better than man hasn't come along. But
you can write manpages in anything (rst, markdown, LibreOffice ...) and
have them converted to man pages via packages like pandoc —
https://pandoc.org/ . But when you need PDF output, TeX is lurking in
there somewhere. I recently spent time debugging why a major embedded
project never came with a PDF manual, despite their docs being managed
in Sphinx. It turns out that there's one instance of a Unicode omega /
Ohm symbol in their entire document base, and their Sphinx PDF rules
aren't Unicode-aware.
At least its better than Microsoft, whose embedded docs are essentially
just Bing searches.
cheers,
Stewart
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