Franois Pinard replies:

Jim Osborn writes:

...

the tar developers seem to have a political problem with the classic man pages.

Maybe slightly political, but the real truth is that it was not practical spoiling human energies at maintaining parallel documentation in many formats. As Texinfo format is _undoubtedly_ superior to `man', at least to anybody being a bit honest, the choice of crafting a parallel `man' page did not remain. On the other hand, the automated derivation of a `man' page from the `--help' output is quite acceptable, and this is why we managed to do it.

As I said, this concise listing of the various options, with enough explanation to guide the user with at least rudimentary experience is extremely helpful.

...

the last thing they want is to confront a cryptic "info" system. Give the poor user a simple, single file to read with a pager like less.

I never understood why people are so reluctant to learn the first letter of the words Next, Previous, Up and Menu, or use the space key to page forward. That's all you need. I would be tempted to say that `less' has many more commands than `info', and I've never been tempted to call it cryptic. I think that the habit of bashing Info is mainly folklore, which came both from die-hard `man' people and keyboard-less Netscape users :-).

Well, perhaps you can "de-crypt" a few things I've been unable to figure out with the info system: 1: How do I scroll a single line forward or back? Often the text I'm reading is split inconveniently off the top or bottom of the screen, and I want to bring the entire paragraph onscreen so I can study it. What's the info equivalent of less' <ret> to scroll one line down, or 1b to go one line backward? 2: How do I scroll directly to the end of the current page? Often I happen to know that some point I'm interested in is discussed near the end of the current section, and I'd like to flip directly there, then back to the part I'm currently reading. After I've been to the end of the page (or, say, the beginning) how can I go directly back to where I was before all this jumping around, say, in the middle of the page? 3: How can I scroll unidirectionally (keeping in mind question 1) through the entire document? If I want to make an initial pass through the information, how can I know I've seen it all? I'm an old keyboard person myself, and I can sympathise with the need to maintain a single set of documentation. The reason I consider less "simpler" than info is less' abstraction of the document as a single monolithic file. Once you have a rough idea of where the information you're seeking is located in that file, it's conceptually easy to scroll forward or backward to it. A simple key search helps you find things initially, and a set of marks lets you jump directly to any of 256 locations. That's the extent of the less command I use, despite its daunting array of options and commands. For documents of fewer than, say, fifty pages, it's a nice simple reader. The info system of hyperlinks, or menus, seems much less straightforward in its abstraction of the document itself. I'm not convinced I've ever been able to see the entire info document for tar, for example, as I don't know if I've poked into all its corners and cul de sacs. I find myself going round and round various loops, feeling sure I've seen this page before, but not having a clear idea where this page is in the information tree. Maybe an answer to question 3 above would solve this problem. Thanks for the thoughts, Jim -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/