Re: "full" man pages, please?

[L A Walsh]

Bernhard Voelker wrote:
> First of all, the Texinfo manual is the primary way for documentation
> in GNU projects:
>   
----
   Broken by design doesn't excuse conforming to existing standards.
> 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.
>   
----  
   More evidence that info pages are broken.  If they can't be
easily converted into manpages, how can they be printed or index
by document indexing search engines?  You are admitting that
information encoded into 'info' can't be readily displayed in
a flat-file manpage form.  As such, it's obviously not suitable
as a base for project or tool documentation.

   I suggest you fix info or abandon it.
> 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),
----
   Single node -- that's part of the problem.  
I want 1 page for the tool.  I don't want to have to navigate and
learn emacs navigation to read manpages.  If you can print all the tool's
help in 1 HTML page, you can print it in 1 manpage.  It's a bug in
info that doesn't readily provide or allow that.


> So after all: while the advantages may be tempting, the effort to keep
> texinfo and man in sync is too high for coreutils.
>   
---
   So info is broken.  Get rid of
> Consider the mess in findutils: some information exists in the man page,
> while other is in the Texinfo manual.  Not useful either.
>   
---
   Gnu documentation isn't user friendly.  Manpage tools
exist to print output in various formats.  If info can't
meet the same criteria, it should be abandoned.  Complaining
you can't produce full manpages from an 'info' format is only
proving that it is deficient.