Re: [bug #24052] man page info.1 is nearly useless

[dan pritts]

Hi Karl -



> It's generated from the --help message, as with many other GNU packages.
> I don't want to maintain information in yet another place, the current
> situation is already suboptimal.

thanks for taking the time to think about this and to reply.

> I rather doubt you'll find it sufficient, 

you are wise :)

> but maybe it's better than nothing:

you are very wise.  

Given that "info" is the lowest common denominator for documentation viewing, 
it seems useful to put some extra effort into maintaining the external 
documentation for it.

As a crusty unix type, I think this should be the man page but maybe i'm wrong. 
 


I'm open to ideas; i just want to get work done.  Here are a few thoughts.  I 
think most of them are pretty easy to implement.

The --help/man page includes the URL for the texinfo package, but maybe it 
should also include the top-level URL for the documentation at 
http://www.gnu.org/doc/ 

how about a URL for how to use the info program?  i.e., the HTML dump of the 
info document for the info program?  (I can't easily find it online right now)

More people know how to view HTML than know how to view most other formats, 
including man pages.  So how about installing a copy of that HTML by default 
when you install the software?  It would perhaps be suboptimal but probably 
acceptable to pre-generate that as part of the source code distribution.  

How about another man page, referenced by the first, that has the ascii dump of 
that info page?


Yikes.  I didn't know about "pinfo".  I just noticed its existence right now.  

I am not sure it is part of texinfo per se, but it is listed on your web page.  
It seems worthy of a "see also" in the manual/help text.  




thanks,
danno