Info vs man [was: Playground pager lsp(1)]

[tomas]

On Wed, Apr 05, 2023 at 08:15:31PM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:

[subject changed: see my other mail]

> Probably never going to happen IMHO.  "Imagine a world where all
> programming languages converge and their users don't notice"...
> see how that sounds?

For some value of "happen". I think this is more a process than
a "final result". Once we're done, Youtube will have taken over.
Ot TikTok. Or some machine-brain interface by Tesla, powered by
ChatGPT 10.0 beta.

> Truth is that there are many historical or technical circumstances
> as to why people might use one system or another, and while arguing
> about which is better might be fun, it is mostly a waste of time.

Definitely. "Better" is "works for you", where "you" is a
variable.

> I didn't see much relevance of this discussion thread for help-texinfo
> other than to denigrate "the GNU guys".

If you read this out of my posts, this wasn't my intention at
all.

> Some points in response to this thread:
> 
> * It's possible to have a cross-reference from an Info file to a
> manpage - it would look like *Note bash manpage:(*manpages*)bash(1).
> But this is not recommended at all.  In fact, it may only work in
> the info browser by accident, and not by design.

See my other post: the ideal I'd strive for would be to have a
ref to "bash's documentation" (if doable with a loc): the reader
would try to resolve that to whatever your preferred documentation
format and location is (info, man, HTML, PDF...; your machine,
the Interwebs).

> * info cannot reflow the text to adapt to different display widths.
> This is a limitation of the Info format.  It is probably not so
> different to the case of man pages, in fact, as they need to be
> regenerated from the groff source to get a different width, as Eli
> said in his recent message.  The difference is that the groff source
> is installed and used by the "man" program, whereas Texinfo source is
> not used by the "info" program.

There will be differences in the renderers. Neither info nor man
can do pics, HTML and PDF can. Pics aren't for all people. We
have to live with that (in fact, for some, some limitations are
actually assets: if you are a visual person, memorising stuff
by its screen position, reflowing is a Very Bad Thing. Good
design is hard, because you have to put yourself into the brains
of so many diffetent people).

> > The future is already here: just use Texinfo manuals for everything.

This is exactly the kind of attitude which hinders progress here.

I assume Eli meant that tongue-in-cheek, he does have that kind
of dry humour I actually like. But here, I find that unhelpful.

Cheers
-- 
t

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