Re: What does 'safely' mean in man mktemp?

[Peng Yu]

> If you were creating a new GNU program from scratch and were starting
> to write documentation for it then the format of that documentation
> would be expected to be texinfo format.  Documentation in the format
> of a man page is optional.  It might not exist at all.

I have seldom seen a well developed package (not necessarily GNU
packages) without manpages. In fact, I don't remember I have seen any.
Do you have any statistics on what packages (not necessarily GNU) have
manpage but not infopage and what packages have infopages but not
manpages.

> Wiki?  What wiki?  Could you send a URL to what you are referring to
> please?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texinfo

>> The difference between info program and man program from a user
>> perspective is more like vim and emas. I guess that it is hard to
>> convert user from one camp to the others (which in general true for
>> users of competitive tools).
>
> Documentation for the most part consists of words on a page.  A lot of
> it is converted to html format and displayed on a web page.  A lot is
> printed out and read on paper.  A lot of people read documentation
> using info, pinfo, emacs, man, more, less, lynx, elinks, w3m,
> iceweasel, icecat, chromium, epiphany, or other display program.
> After the words have been written it is up to you to read them.

No. It depends on how fast you can access the document. By far, man is
the fastest way.

Typing 'man mktemp' is faster than "info coreutils 'mktemp
invocation'". Command line is always faster than web browser + google.

> There is an old saying.  You can lead a horse to water but you can't
> make them drink.  I think that applies here.  A lot of documentation
> is written but you can't make people read it.

I'd say the other way. A lot of document is written but is not written
in the most accessible way and easily understandable way. So people
don't read due to these two reasons.

>> As a vim person, I don't like the vim like man has less materials
>> than info. The current way making man same as help is not making
>> sense to me.
>
> Sorry but I do not understand what you are tring to say.  I am
> completely befuddled and unable to parse it.

I'm saying there is not point to make manpage shorter than infopage.
It is like a punishment to people who use vim. Note that pinfo and
info --vi-keys mentioned by Andreas are not a replacement for man.
Some key bindings of these two tools are different from man.

> You do not need to learn emacs keys to read documentation.  The
> program you use to display the documentation is not the same as the
> documentation itself.

I'm saying that most of the info keys are the same as the emacs keys.
Learning info keys is equivalent to learning some emacs keys. But I
don't use emacs at all. I have tried to learn info keys, but since I
don't use emacs, I quickly forget what I have learned except only a
few keys which is insufficient for me to navigate infopage.

> Is that what this misunderstanding is all about?  You think that you
> need to use emacs to read info pages?  That is not correct.  The info
> pages are available in a variety of formats and with a variety of
> viewers.  Use whatever viewer you wish to use.  You do not need to use
> emacs to read the documentation.  You do not need to use vi/vim to
> read the documentation.

In summary,

1. man is the fastest way to access document.
2. man to vim is like info to emacs
3. people use one editor can use the corresponding doc reader (man for
vim and emacs for info) more easily.
4. people easily forget the key bindings unless they use them every
day. So for a vim person easily forget info keys binding, and vice
versa.
5. creating a manpage with the same content from the infopage require
almost no effort.
6. the current manpage is the same as the help, so when people what
concise documents, they can just use --help.

So the conclusion is that the optimal solution is to make manpages the
same as the infopages.

-- 
Regards,
Peng