Re: info info should return something more than just an error message

[Michail L. Liarmakopoulos]

Gabin, Alfred,

Thank you both.

It's not that `man info` isn't enough for my purposes, I just felt that since there exists a `man man` there should also exist an `imfo info` for matters of symmetry.

Regarding RCA, apologies for using it. I meant an Root Cause Analysis. I understand that this has already been done, judging from your reply, so kindly disregard this one.

Thank you both again for seriously looking into this.

Best,

Mike

---
Michail L. Liarmakopoulos, MSc

On Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 11:52 Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Nov 28, 2021 at 04:51:50AM +0100, Michail L. Liarmakopoulos wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I was playing today with info and man with some friends over some Discord
> server and we discovered the following:
>
> *Info version:*
> I have the info command of version 6.5:
>
> milia@Newton:~/Downloads/apljk/apljk-related-repos$ man info | tail
> >        This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
> > There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
>
>
> SEE ALSO
> >        The full documentation for info is provided by the
> > texinfo-doc-nonfree package as a Texinfo manual.  If this package is
> > installed at your site, the command
>
>
> >               info info
>
>
> >        should give you access to the complete manual.  (Or, if you have
> > Emacs, M-x info will lead to the manual.)

As Alfred said there is an info manual for info.

I believe that this should not be an issue in more recent versions of
Ubuntu (or other Debian-derived distributions) due to the
texinfo-doc-nonfree package being retired.  There's no reason they shouldn't
be installing the Texinfo manuals as the licence (GFDL without Cover Texts
or Invariant Sections) is considered free by Debian policies, AFAIK.

> *Friendly feature requests:*
> 1. Could you please write an info for the info program so that the `info
> info` doen't return just an error message, but provides a full length
> description about how info works, with line count larger than `man info` ?

If the issue persists with defective Texinfo installations by distributions,
perhaps we should add a message to explain if "info info" doesn't work, then
the distribution is at fault.  I expect this wouldn't be an issue with newer
distributions though.  It's a shame that people don't have access
to Texinfo manuals because of past issues with the GFDL, and this is
reflecting poorly on the Texinfo system.


> 2. Could you please do a RCA as to why we get the error "info: No menu item
> 'man' in node '(dir)Top'" when we do `info man`? I believe this shouldn't
> be displayed.

Sorry I don't know what an RCA is.  I don't believe there is a Texinfo manual
for man.  There is an info page for groff which does the back-end processing
for man, but man is a separate program.