On 12/14/2012 06:07 PM, Bill Gradwohl wrote: > I'm not trying to start a war, but ... > > Has anyone entertained the idea of getting rid of the man pages and the > info system? Those are relics of the tty era. > Don't make the error of confusing the texinfo system with just the info format. I, for one, *never* read pages in the info format. However, I never had any problem reading the official documentation of GNU packages -- I just read the HTML version that is generated by exactly the same texinfo sources used to generate the info pages (as well as the PDF manuals for printing are).
> [SNIP] > A WIKI set up could allow people to augment the docs with some authority > then editing the content to keep it up to some standard. Greg's site is > excellent, as are several others, and that's the issue. There is no one > authoritative place to go to get the OFFICIAL docs in a modern form. > What's wrong with <http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html>? Or, if you want a local version, just install the 'bash-doc' package on Debian (or the equivalent package that surely comes with other distros). > Who wants to learn how to write and submit man or info docs when the future > is clearly html, especially when neither man nor info has the rendering > capability html has? > Nobody writes info directly; one writes Texinfo, and that can be automatically translated to info, html, PDF (and PostScript and DVI too, not that it matters today). And I must say that I find the HTML generated from texinfo sources of high quality (nor perfect, granted, but definitely good enough). Writing something directly in HTML seems absurd today, IMHO. We want higher-level languages, and Texinfo is an excellent example of such a language, at least for most technical manuals. > If the Linux community as a whole missed one technical release cycle to > instead concentrate on properly documenting what already exists, the effort > would pay off in spades for all future releases. > I don't see how HTML-only documentation would be an improvement; it would be a huge step back, actually. Regards, Stefano
