The Unix Haters' Handbook

[John Floren]

On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 9:19 AM, Jules Richardson
<jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Richard wrote:
>
> > The worst part is when they intentionally cripple the man page and
> > force you into the awful info system.
> >
>
>  Aha, the old "The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages,  and  create
> info documents instead". Bastards. :-)
>
>  My preference order goes something like: man page, book, online docs, other
> online resources (Google search, usenet etc.), utility's built-in help,
> 'info' documentation.
>
>  How old is 'info' anyway -  does it pre-date widespread (whatever that may
> mean!) web use? I don't think I had cause to come across it until mid/late
> 90s (man pages were pretty well maintained until about then), by which time
> the web was well established. I'm not sure if info is a poor imitation of a
> bunch of HTML pages, or merely a poor implementation of a more general
> hypertext system (which had of course been around for many years previous)
>
>  cheers
>
>  Jules (skirting the bounds of off-topicness a little... sorry)
>

GNU info reminds me of the ITS help system, which isn't too surprising
considering the Head Idiot's background. Have I made it clear yet that
I really dislike Stallman? I like ITS and LispM, Stallman's favorites
which are now, as Dennis Ritchie says, fertilizing the OS field from
below; I just don't like Stallman.

John
-- 
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn