RE: man v. info

[(Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk>]

On 25-Dec-01 Imre Vida wrote:
> [snip]
> The major sources of help/information for me are
> the apropos, the -h/--help options and the man pages.
> These are fast and efficient means to find what i want
> most of the time.
> 
> As far as info is concerned, i fully agree with Karsten.  
> It doesn't work intuitively for me either; i just get 
> lost in the maze of links and 3 sentence pages....
> I hate it for this.
> 
> The lack of manpages, and outdated manpages are frustrating.  
> And what Karsten brought up is also a nice idea:
> to have examples in man pages. There are some manpages with examples 
> but most of them are without although they are really helpful.
> [snip]

I really agree with this. I find 'info' very frustrating;
the most useful way I have found to use it is simply to
scroll through as if it was one continous document, and
at that stage it might as well be in 'man' format anyway.

If you reall want to search through a 'man' page,
a simple way is

  man whatever | col -b | less

('col -b' strips out any highlighting/underlining,
e.g. 'b^Hbo^Hol^Hld^Hd' and allows the keywords
to be searched for like all the others).

As to what to do about it, I can only suggest
"reinstate the man pages in full". I know it's
not 'kosher' to disagreee with the GNU "info
policy", but I think that those who do disagree
should say so. After all, it'a a Free and Open
World, isn't it?

Happy Christmas and New Year, and best wishes to all,
Ted.

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Date: 25-Dec-01                                       Time: 17:00:36
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