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Re: [OFFTOPIC] Info files vs Man pages
- To: Alex Buell <alex dot buell at tahallah dot demon dot co dot uk>
- Subject: Re: [OFFTOPIC] Info files vs Man pages
- From: Kamil Iskra <kamil at dwd dot interkom dot pl>
- Date: Wed, 16 Sep 1998 11:54:16 +0200 (EEST)
- cc: Jeffrey A Law <law at cygnus dot com>, egcs at cygnus dot com, Linux Glibc <glibc-linux at ricardo dot ecn dot wfu dot edu>
On Tue, 15 Sep 1998, Alex Buell wrote:
> I'm very sure I have seen a texi2man converter somewhere, anyone knows if
> such a beast exists? Then it could well be a matter of putting in a shell
> script to convert the texi files into man format & install. This, I think
> is probably the easiest option.
Perhaps, but what purpose would it serve? Do you really suggest that a
1.5+ MB man page is useful? It's just a waste of space on your drive and a
waste of time if you try to find something there.
man pages are supposed to provide clear, concise reference information
about commandline options and stuff like that. On the contrary, EGCS info
files contains GNU GPL, "look and feel" manifesto, description of RTL, md,
tm etc. Do you really suggest to put them in a man page?
> Also, I'm sure the man stuff could be improved by allowing hypertext links
> (a la Lynx) so one can move around.
But they wouldn't be man pages anymore. They would essentially turn into
info pages.
/ Kamil Iskra AmigaOS Linux/i386 Linux/m68k \
| GeekGadgets m68k-amigaos GCC maintainer |
| iskra@student.uci.agh.edu.pl kiskra@ernie.icslab.agh.edu.pl |
\ kamil@dwd.interkom.pl http://student.uci.agh.edu.pl/~iskra /