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From
SubjectRe: info format (was Re: Linux 2.2.11pre4)
Date
Followup to:  <199908040413.WAA07796@ellpspace.math.ualberta.ca>
By author: Michal Jaegermann <michal@ellpspace.math.ualberta.ca>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> torvalds> The "info" interface makes sense only to people who grok GNU
> torvalds> emacs,
>
> I do not get it. There is a number of different info readers around,
> with different interfaces. In particular both KDE and Gnome have
> one included (integrated with another stuff). I do not see why
> somebody who thinks that a "better" interface could be used will not
> simply write one. If it will be really better then it will be
> used all over the place and there will be no problem.
>
> torvalds> and if you actually want to be user-friendly you either
> torvalds> use "man" (because that's how everything else is documented and
> torvalds> then you could actually just tell people to use man everywhere)
>
> This is somewhat ridiculous for documents with sizes of a few hundreds
> pages (and your disk is likely full of such documents). This was tried
> with Perl4, for example, and results were not very friendly.
> A 'manpage' around 10 printed pages in size is already pushing, IMO.
>

OTOH, it is even more ridiculous to not maintain the man page for
"cp".

>
> Actually 'info' is a hypertext format which predates HTML by years and,
> if you look a bit closer, is **much** better suited for most of a computer
> documentation than HTML which really has a different purpose in life;
> grepping through HTML is not a very nice experience most of the time,
> for example. There are other advantages as well. Moreover nobody writes
> 'info' files by hand but they are generated from 'texinfo' sources
> which have converters to few other formats, including printed books,
> and there was somewhere 'texi2html' as well. As for reader interfaces -
> once again, nothing in the format dictates how they should look like.
>

There are some MAJOR problems with info, however; one of them being
the requirement of a system-wide index, which usually doesn't work too
well at all. man pages get installed and they are immediately
recognizable.

Furthermore, there is the complete lack of even optional formatting
hints in the browsable form; although you can generate formatting from
TeX the result lacks all the references. If there was a dvi browser
which would preserve the hyperlinks, that would perhaps be another
issue; perhaps someone ought to make a decent way for TeX to output
PDF...

Grepping through HTML *source* may suck (as would grepping through
TeXinfo source or troff source) but HTML can be converted to ASCII
text; in fact, "lynx -dump" does a pretty good job with it (I wish
there was a half-decent command-line HTML to PS converter, too.)

-hpa
--
"The user's computer downloads the ActiveX code and simulates a 'Blue
Screen' crash, a generally benign event most users are familiar with
and that would not necessarily arouse suspicions."
-- Security exploit description on http://www.zks.net/p3/how.asp

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