Re: Common source for man page and info document?

[Charles Levert]

* On Sunday 2005-11-13 at 18:35:04 +0000, Julian Foad wrote:
> I'm getting very annoyed by the mis-match between the man page and the info 
> document.  I and Debian and others don't want to lose the man page, and 
> GNU/FSF don't want to lose the "info" document.  (I could probably grow to 
> like the "info" format if the basic GNU "info" viewer program wasn't so 
> primitive and clunky.

TeXinfo is nice, because of the TeX and dvi side
of things.  Also because it's a real book.  I do
wish TeX (just like info) was more modern with
regards to treating U+0027 and U+0060 as in the
current (for a long time really) incarnation of
ASCII, not as oriented quotes, when in verbatim
monospaced text.

The info format has always kinda sucked.


> It even displays "man" pages (when no "info" exists) 
> WORSE than the standard "man" viewer does.)

This is just my opinion, but the GNU Project
should have done the opposite of this a long time
ago, even before the advent of Linux distros.
There should have been a GNU man package early
on (separate from either GNU groff, GNU Emacs,
standalone GNU info, or texinfo.tex), targeted at
all the people who instinctively invoke "man".
Nearly nobody ever got used to first typing
"info"; typing "man" is the single thing that
most _users_, who are not necessarily *roff
coders, are attached to.  This "man" should have
had the native and transparent ability to read
info files.  Its default output would have had
the typical man-output look and would have been
fed to $PAGER.  TeXinfo (and the info format)
would have evolved with a minimal-use @ifman
(or @manindex) if needed, just like @ifinfo and
@iftex, mostly to document where to find a man
page's traditional sections.  Of course, this
"man" could also have invoked nroff as well (not
necessarily GNU's), just like any other "man".
Then, there would never have been an incentive to
develop the current man package that is commonly
found on Linux distros.  Maybe the standalone
"info" should just have been
"man --real-book --full-screen" or something.


> We need one of those systems that can generate both from the same source.
> Any realistic ideas?  There must be some in fairly widespread use.

I agree.  Let's look around for tools.  We may
need to merge the "grep Programs" sections
under "Invoking grep", which is special, but
maintenance would just be more efficient.