[TUHS] Another "craft" discussion topic - mindless tool proliferation

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 06:02:06PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> 
> +1.  Man pages should be short things that remind you how to run the program.
> Putting a user guide in man pages is nuts, and in today's world texinfo is
> just as nuts.  Put it on the web and move on.  But don't give me the see
> texinfo man page, I hate that crap.

Most of the core Unix utilities, even those coming from GNU, have real
man pages, at least under Debian and Debian derivatives.  That's
because Debian makes it the package maintainer's responsibility to
provide a real man page if the package doesn't have one.  If you are
using Debian or Ubuntu, or some other Debian derivative, and you find
a man page which says, "see the texinfo/info file", you should file a
bug.

The other thing that often happens is that the html pages are
available in /usr/share/doc/<pkg> --- but often they were generated
from a texinfo file.  I personally prefer to use an info file reader,
as it tends to use much less battery power than a browser.  So if you
prefer:

	sensible-browser /usr/share/make/make-doc/make.html/index.html

over "info make", choice is good, right?

					- Ted