Re: Playground pager lsp(1)

[Arsen Arsenović]

tomas@tuxteam.de writes:

> On Wed, Apr 05, 2023 at 12:11:44PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> > Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2023 11:03:36 +0200
>> > From: tomas@tuxteam.de
>> > Cc: help-texinfo@gnu.org
>> > 
>> > I was dreaming of a world where both doc systems converge
>> > in a way their respective users don't notice [...]
>
>> The future is already here: just use Texinfo manuals for everything.
>
> Not the one I dreamt of. No TLDP man pages. No kernel.org docs.

kernel.org docs are written in a format that is quite similar to
Texinfo, that is rST, and offer little advantage over Texinfo-generated
HTML (at least advantage that can't be reconciled), with the
disadvantage of not being accessible via standard GNU means, so I don't
see why they would be excluded from such a world.

WRT to TLDP man pages, I doubt they'd be found obsolete, as they are an
excellent reference.  There's a place for man, that TLDP fits well, but
it's limited to small-form text due to using pagers and lacking links
and hierarchical structure.  For instance, an info document for the
standard C I/O facilities could cover far broader concepts than the
pages for fwrite, fread, fputs, fscanf, ... individually do.

> Excludes those accustomed to the man page interface (you may
> dislike it all you want).

Writing alternative Info viewers is a relatively easy task, it has been
done before (pinfo, info2html, and probably others I don't recall), so I
don't see why a viewer accustomed to ones workflow is a contradiction.

> Annihilating the others is a strange way to make peace. Besides,
> in this case, it won't happen.

I don't think that was the intention.  man pages have a clear purpose in
a GNU system: providing a quick reference for the typical use case, akin
to --help.  This is what the format is suitable for, after all, and
larger and more complex manual pages (like those of Bash) demonstrate
why it's unsuitable in general (ad-hoc regex search is simply unsuitable
for searching long-form text, indices are an essential feature, and are
the primary reason why I bothered getting acclimated to info-stnd in the
first place).

I've heard that some have started summarizing man pages as 'tldr pages'
or such.  That might be a familiar analogue from the real world.

> Cheers

Have a lovely day!
-- 
Arsen Arsenović

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