General complaint about GNU's preference for "info" versus "man"
From:
Harold . Hutchison
Subject:
General complaint about GNU's preference for "info" versus "man"
Date:
Fri, 21 Apr 2006 13:56:26 -0700
I finally have decided to vent on this
a bit, but I do not expect anything to change. Still, my stress level
will drop a bit for the effort, so it will be worth it:
Man pages should be complete and should
also be the primary source of online documentation, not "info".
I have been a Unix user since 1990, which doesn't qualify me as a
pioneer, but neither does it classify me as a newby. During this
time, I have become accustomed to using man to learn or remember the sometimes
obscure switches for the various Unix commands. Only when I started
using Linux did I come across the reference (from within the manpages)
to "info" for more complete information. I don't know who
originally decided to encourage this dichotomy, but whoever it was should
have known better (and perhaps should be beaten...). It is counterproductive
to have two distinct and seperate sets of information for the same command...if
I have to explain why, then I suppose I'm *really* wasting my time...
The fact is that almost everyone, even the proponents of "info",
at times refers to the ubiquitous manpages. Their everpresence is
comforting, and in fact required, for us Unix users. Please, GNU
guys, come to your senses and just put *all* of the "info" back
into the manpages.