man pages

[Tom Buskey]

bscott at ntisys.com said:
>On Fri, 13 Dec 2002, at 2:48pm, steveo at syslang.net wrote:
>> info pages are really cool.
>
>  GNU Info is yet another non-standard, incompatible hypertext system that
>is only used by the vendor that created it.  The only thing that keeps it

Created at a time when there were no standards for hypertext.  It was 
designed to have navigatable docs (when serial terminals were the norm) 
that could easily be printed.  They chose to add on to the TeX system 
which they chose over *roff because it was freely redistributable.  
groff hadn't been written yet either.  I think RMS reached further then 
too; I think he meant to replace all the *roff system, including man.

If you take it in the context of the era it was created, it had a lot 
going for it.  I could also take the texinfo file, add the texinfo 
macro file to my TeX setup, and print it on any TeX system.  IIRC the 
info browser was also ported to different systems.  I started learning 
this stuff with the GNUish ports to DOS on a 286.  I could read them 
and print them.  I couldn't do that with man pages at the time.

>  The rest of the freaking planet has moved to HTML.  For crying out loud,
>even *Microsoft*, the world's least-friendly software company, has moved to
>HTML.  I can read the documentation for Microsoft Exchange easier than I can
>read the docs for GCC.  It is about time GNU got off their expletive
>high-horse and got with the freaking program.

texi2html works very well.  I used to put all the GNU docs up on an 
internal web page with 
it.

>
>  The fact that GNU refuses to provide man pages ("The GNU project regards
>man pages as obsolete") only further aggravates the situation with GNU Info.


It would really be nice to have a single source for the docs.  You used 
to be able to do man -k to help search.

The problem is that various groups decided there's something wrong with 
man pages.  GNU went with texinfo, Perl with pod, Docbook, etc, etc. 

Nowadays, I think a web server with a search engine with various
(dynamic) conversions from texinfo, man, pod, docbook and the other
formats (gnome, kde) would be worthwhile for a site.  I've seen CGI man
gateways and I've done the texi2html thing.  The important thing is
easily including and indexing them.

It's not an easy problem.


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Tom Buskey