Re: [bug #42963] Links in man pages point to other man pages even if info available

[Gavin Smith]

On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 6:59 AM, Volker Siegel <address@hidden> wrote:
> We have opened related info pages 'cut' and 'column',
> then navigated the info pages, to reach the same page, 'ls'.
>
> For that reason, we can expect to end up on the same page.
>
>
> A possible solution is to map links to man pages into links to info pages if
> available.
>
For this, lookup in the dir files would be required, which does not
normally happen for following links: e.g. find the "ls" entry in dir
indicating the coreutils.info file. An idea I had, which could help in
this situation, is to have something like the functionality of the
"--all" option available whenever you follow a link. There would be a
variable to control what happens when you follow a link. I can think
of several choices: select the first Info file found in the search
path and look for a man page if that fails, as happens at current;
look for an Info file under the same subdirectory as the current file
(to stay within the documentation for one "prefix hierarchy"); or
tcreate a menu with all dir entries, Info files and a man page (as
--all does). When following a link in a man page, you could then
choose between the man page or the applicable Info page.

(One complication is that the Info file reached may not actually
document the same installed program as the reached man page, depending
on the search path of the "man" command (e.g., the Info file could be
under the /usr prefix, the man page under /usr/local). There is
probably nothing to be done about this, though.)