> Personally I really like info better than HTML and man, because with
> emacs it's very easy to browse with the keyboard, you can search the
With what? EMACS is an optional thing. troff is not lightweight too, but
it doesn't come anywhere to the EMACS ballpark.
> whole file (you can't search in nested HTML-files), copy text from the
> info file into another emacs buffer, use incremental search (C-s in
> emacs) and the font and background is your favorite and so it's
> easyest to read on your screen.
>
> But I hate the info-program to display info-files because you can't
> use it intuitively.
> This may also be true for people who don't use emacs but with Texinfo
> you can make info, ASCII text, HTML and TeX. So a Texinfo
> documentation should meet everyone's needs. The same is true for the
> linuxdoc SGML documentation system.
Except conversion to plain text requires TeX, IIRC, and that's Not
Good(tm). To start with, TeX *is* heavier than troff. Personally I have it
around, but not everyone does. And keeping all manual pre-compiled is not
too nice - eats space.
The only reason for info vs. man is that there are documents too large for
manpages. BSD keeps that stuff (written in troff) in the /usr/share/doc .
AFAIK the *real* reason behind info being that it came from ITS (along
with EMACS). IIRC the ITS RUNOFF was much weaker than troff and it wasn't
easy to run from within TECO. Oh, well... At least GNU doesn't use DDT
clone instead of shell...
> I think the documentation for gcc, glibc, make etc. is all in Texinfo,
> so you can make HTML easily from it.
Yeah, except that it's blatantly incompatible with other Unices. When you
have telnet session to SunOS box in one VC, shell session (Linux) on
another and telnet to OpenBSD on the third... Consistency becomes an
issue. Hrrrmmm... new book for O'Reilly, anyone? "GNU Annoyances"...
Said that, the only real responce to GNU policy being to maintain
alternative version of their documentation. In sane format. So we may
bitch about their choice, but it doesn't oblige anyone to anything. They
have the perfect right to choose whatever format they like, even if it's
an uuencoded Word document and in case of gcc they are the only game in
the town...
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