Re: manpage for GNU utilities?
Hi,
Kai thinks that emacs key bindings have no logic behind them;
I find there to be an elegant consistency there. He hates the
bindings, I have them coded into my DNA. He finds things easier to
search for in man pages, I find the multiple document scanning
features of info wondeful. He thinks man is far from perfect, but
info is far worse, I feel info is great, and an improvement over man.
Of course, these (intensely strong) personal preferneces have
only passing relevance to a policy discussion like this:
documentation formats shall always be a very personal choice, and you
can never please everyone all the time.
Just like you can never get to choose the one true editor, one
can never decide on the one true documentation format.
I think we should not allow wrong or obsolete documentation in
*any* format, but pointing off to docs in another format should be
acceptable.
Providing documentation in format X when the upstream provides
it in format Y as a one time conversion is not good enough unless an
machine based conversion process is available, since with ever
upstream upgrade someone has to maintain the non native
documentation.
That is not practical.
So, we let upstream authors provide documentation as they may,
and convert it all to a common preferred format (HTML), since that
format is dumb enough that it is the least common denominator and all
kinds of automated conversion tools exist (man, sgml, latex, tex,
pod, info, can all be converted to html).
manoj
--
"Justice, like lightning, should ever appear To some men hope, to
other mean fear." Jefferson Pierce
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@acm.org> <http://www.datasync.com/%7Esrivasta/>
Key C7261095 fingerprint = CB D9 F4 12 68 07 E4 05 CC 2D 27 12 1D F5 E8 6E
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