Re: Why? -- "A Modest Proposal"

[Greg Wooledge <wooledg@eeg.ccf.org>]

On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 10:37:41PM +0100, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> While Gnu does prefer info format to man page format (and they have
> their reasons, e.g. info allows links), the man pages (usually derived
> from the texinfo source) are well-structured, complete and have a
> solid language. I can't agree with you in that they are "atrocious",
> barring some exceptions. De gustibus... obviously.

I concede that they have a point about how texinfo is superior to the
*roff format, for several reasons, not least of which being that *roff
is a proprietary format whose documentation is non-free.  However....

tar(1) on Debian 8:

BUGS
     The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create info documents
     instead.  Unfortunately, the info document describing tar is licensed
     under the GFDL with invariant cover texts, which makes it impossible to
     include any text from that document in this man page.  Most of the text
     in this document was automatically extracted from the usage text in the
     source.  It may not completely describe all features of the program.

sort(1) on Debian 8:

SEE ALSO
       uniq(1)

       Full documentation at: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/sort>
       or available locally via: info '(coreutils) sort invocation'

ls(1) on Debian 8:

SEE ALSO
       Full documentation at: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/ls>
       or available locally via: info '(coreutils) ls invocation'


I could continue for some time.  Each of these man pages is missing
information that appears only in the info page.  The only GNU project
man page that is a complete reference document is bash(1), which is
very, very different from the other GNU man pages.