[UFO Chicago] Re: Brian's Conversion from FreeBSD to Debian and Questions on X

[Neil R. Ormos]

Ian Bicking wrote:
> Brian Sobolak wrote:

>> At least I haven't been told "This man page is
>> no longer kept up to date; the latest
>> documentation is maintained as an info page."
>> Ugh.  info.

> I don't know why they don't give up on that.
> It's fairly uncommon for the info page to be any
> different than the manpage, except for long
> stuff that is better done as a web page.

I appreciate having both man pages and info pages.
Although web pages can be a nice way to present a
manual, I don't always have a GUI running when I
need to view a man page, and web-page manuals are
tedious to navigate with text-based browsers.
Info can be nice if you need to do a lot of
navigation or a search on a regular expression.

I do find the "this man page is no longer kept up
to date" message a little annoying and pedantic.
I'm sure there's a way you can author materials in
some common format and have it automatically
rendered or converted into the man, info, and html
formats, so that the cost of continuing to provide
traditional man pages is negligible.  It's
unfortunate that so much of this is governed by
doctrine rather than praticality.

--Neil