Re: General complaint about GNU's preference for "info" versus "man"

[Karl Berry]

    tb> Do you think of an additional meta-syntax for Texinfo source
    files, so that special tools can create man and --help out of it?

GCC does this (for man pages, not for --help).  It ends up requiring a
lot of contortions in the writing, it seems to me; readers simply have
very different expectations of man pages and Texinfo manuals.  I think
help2man and info --usage are more widely applicable approaches.  So I
am not too excited about adding something to the base language -- not
that I would reject out of a hand a well-thought-out design and
implementation :).

As for integrating the source code with the --help output, etc., the
autogen and gengetopt GNU packages do that job.  I personally find that
that is the point at which the overhead outweighs the usefulness.  I
also don't necessarily want to be constrained to use exactly the same
words in all those places; terseness is necessary in --help, but not in
the Texinfo manual.

Best,
karl