Re: Info Problem
"Karsten M. Self" <kmself@ix.netcom.com> writes:
> on Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 12:00:10PM -0500, Bijan Soleymani (bijan@psq.com) wrote:
>> 5) It splits a programs docs into multiple pages.
>>
>> Again you can convert it to html all on one page.
>
> You brilliantly miss the somewhat minor point that the info document
> *isn't* a single page, readily searchable, and accessible via a single
> command-line statement, by default, and that the user has to go through
> several nontrivial steps (particularly for the novice or naive user) to
> extract another, more useful, format. I certainly went years without
> knowing of such options.
info gcc
then hit Control-s and you can search the entire document.
If you don't like that then you can just grep through the info
documentation directly. I mean the things are almost plain ascii.
Basically something like this for compressed info files stored in
debian:
zcat /usr/share/info/gcc-2.95.info* > gcc.info
vi gcc.info
I understand that this may not be exactly what you want out of a
format but these are practical ways of doing what you want.
> [Perl and Python discussion elided]: both are presented in man page,
> and HTML format. No need to use info. Point of contention above being
> that several packages deprecate manpages entirely in favor of info.
> _That_ is the specific practice I detest and would prefer corrected.
> Preparing docs which can be presented in multiple formats, _including_
> manpages, and whatever other silly format(s) are desired, is acceptable.
Although that is their (GNU) stated policy there are very few projects
that have info documentation but (absolutely) no man page
documentation (I think tar maybe is an exception). Most of those
projects are gnome or kde projects which use some docbook or XML type
thing. I don't think the thing about gconf had anything to do with
info vs. man.
Bijan
--
Bijan Soleymani <bijan@psq.com>
http://www.crasseux.com
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