Re: What does 'safely' mean in man mktemp?

[Peng Yu]

> It is a matter of perspective.  The point is that we are building a
> GNU operating system.  The preferred documentation format for GNU is
> info format not man format.

I never said to get rid of info. I'm not sure what you referred to here.

> If you are running a non-GNU system and are only using the GNU
> software as an additional port to it, then you could nag the people
> doing the port from GNU to non-GNU to convert the GNU documentation to
> whatever native formats used there, probably man format but possibly
> html or possibly other formats.  But then that isn't a problem for the
> GNU developers who are already developing documentation in the native
> GNU info format.

The wiki says it clearly. The difference between info program and man
program from a user perspective is more like vim and emas. I guess
that it is hard to convert user from one camp to the others (which in
general true for users of competitive tools). As a vim person, I don't
like the vim like man has less materials than info. The current way
making man same as help is not making sense to me.

"However, there are third party products to convert info pages to man
pages (e.g. info2man). The benefit is that readers can use man and
less/more and do not have to learn the emacs keys for info."

Remember, GNU tools are not just for GNU tool developers. People may
not and should not have to learn emacs if they have already learned
vim.

> The man pages from the --help output is done to make the creation of
> man pages easy enough for developers to justify the effort of doing.
> Because otherwise man format documentation would not exist at all.

The conversion from info to man is even easier (just by info2man).

> I always start with the info documentation first.

As I mentioned above, depending who the user is the emacs key binding
may not be friendly to the user. So why not creating the manpages same
as infopages since it is so easy.

-- 
Regards,
Peng