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

[Gavin Smith]

On Thu, Apr 06, 2023 at 08:29:19AM +0200, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> > https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/Info-Format-Specification.html
> 
 
> As a thought experiment: what would it take for that
> reference above to (also) open a local info viewer?
> 
> The technical part is easy: recognize the prefix and
> substitute it. The exciting part is rather: we need some
> rule set to "build" the URLs as the one above which is
> sufficiently stable to build applications on top of that.

It's not possible to do reliably or simply.  Here's an excerpt
from a file in the Texinfo repository (TODO.HTML):

  It was also an issue as to how to get the manual name from a link.
  In recent Texinfo releases, links to other manuals are annotated with the
  "data-manual" attribute.  This solves the problem of getting the manual
  name.
  
  Texinfo manuals are put on the web with a variety of URL formats and
  it is not possible to reliably get a manual name from a URL or even
  to tell if a URL is to a Texinfo manual or to some other webpapge.  It's
  unlikely we could persuade everybody to change their URL formats to
  be something a browser could parse reliably to get the manual name.  Here
  are some examples of URL's and the manual names:
  
  https://www.gnu.org/software/trans-coord/manual/cvs/html_node/ - "cvs"
  https://gmplib.org/manual/ - "gmp"
  http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/internals/ - "lilypond-internals" 
  
  https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gfortran/ - "gfortran"