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Re: Debian glossary?



On Monday 30 April 2018 10:44:56 Greg Wooledge wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 30, 2018 at 10:37:22AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > The recommendation to get the full story via info/pinfo is a
> > running joke
>
> This is specific to the GNU project.  They're pushing their "info"
> reader and their "texinfo" documentation format for their own
> political reasons. (To be honest, the *roff format used by man pages
> *does* suck.  But still.)
>
> > as those files appear to be made by just copying the man
> > page into the info format.
>
> That's untrue.  Compare a GNU info page to the same tool's GNU man
> page and you will see a huge difference.
>
> wooledg:~$ man ls | wc
>     233     911    7823
> wooledg:~$ info coreutils ls | wc
>     835    4551   34791
>
> In this example, the info page is about 4 times as large as the man
> page.

That is not a fair comparison. The manpage covers one specific piece, a 
single utility, where coreutils supposedly covers it all.


-- 
Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>


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