Comments on: Lazy Reading for 2012/01/15

By: dreamlarva

dreamlarva — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:55:10 +0000

A _lot_ of distributions leave info pages uninstalled so that “info foo” gives the exact same page as “man foo”. But I was very pleasantly surprised when I hit the info page for bash (short pages! navigable links!), as I had searched through the overlong man page (I think comes close to a hundred pages if printed out) for a bit of syntax dozens of times before, and that was hell.

By: Rahul

Rahul — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 07:30:48 +0000

Indeed, info pages never caught on outside the GNU project. The main problems with info pages, it seems to me, are (1) they’re too long and (2) they’re too non-intuitive to navigate: most people don’t want to learn an entire set of new keyboard commands just to get help. And, recognising this, most unix systems / linux distros include manpages anyway, which are “good enough”. Most people consult manpages just for a quick reminder, scroll down and eyeball (or search with /) until you find what you want. Info actually slows that process down.

By: Justin Sherrill

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:39:57 +0000

Have info pages been useful for anyone, ever? I’ve never seen them referenced or quoted or used, other than included in packages.

By: Rahul

Rahul — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:19:56 +0000

From the tar(1) manpage on my Ubuntu computer (which, I imagine, takes it from Debian):

BUGS
The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create info documents
instead. Unfortunately, the info document describing tar is licensed
under the GFDL with invariant cover texts, which makes it impossible to
include any text from that document in this man page. Most of the text
in this document was automatically extracted from the usage text in the
source. It may not completely describe all features of the program.