Re: "full" man pages, please?

[Bernhard Voelker]

On 03/21/2017 09:24 AM, Harald Dunkel wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I highly appreciate your work to provide excellent tools for 
> decades. 
> 
> There is one thing I would like to ask for, though: Would you
> mind to support "full" man pages instead of the "full-docu-can-
> be-found-in-info-or-on-the-web-only" pages (e.g. dd(1), cpio(1))?
> 
> Advantages:
> 
> - no break in your regular workflow, regardless on which 
>   unix-like system you are logged in or which man page you
>   try to access
> 
> - no page breaks, but full documentation on a single page.
>   Its very easy to navigate.
> 
> - focused on providing the information. The user interface
>   is provided by more or less, common to other tools.
> 
> I am not asking you to drop the info pages, of course, but IMHO
> keeping things simple and the DOTADIW approach should still be
> considered as a major feature of Unix-like systems.

First of all, the Texinfo manual is the primary way for documentation
in GNU projects:

https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/GNU-Manuals.html#GNU-Manuals

Second, maintaining the same as man pages is redundant work.
Therefore, we choose to generate the man pages from "--help"
output.

https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Man-Pages.html

Re. "nice" and "printouts" (mentioned by Reuti): what's wrong with
the HTML (one page or single node format), ASCII, DVI or PDF formats?

https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/

So after all: while the advantages may be tempting, the effort to keep
texinfo and man in sync is too high for coreutils.

Consider the mess in findutils: some information exists in the man page,
while other is in the Texinfo manual.  Not useful either.

Have a nice day,
Berny