• jsdz@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    The “info” thing was a misguided attempt by a crazed bunch of emacs zealots to usurp the rightful position of “man”. Probably GNU’s worst idea. It persisted in having some popularity for a decade or more but is now mostly forgotten I think. Despite having used Debian for the past ten years straight I’ve only just now found out that info doesn’t even get installed by default any more.

    • iusearchbtw@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      Eh, to be honest, manpages aren’t particularly good as either documentation or quick references (hence the popularity of tldr), and info is intended primarily for the sort of long-form, comprehensive documentation that would be awkward to fit in a manpage. Also, texinfo documents can easily be exported to HTML, so one format can be used for both online and offline docs. It’s an admirable effort, if nothing else.

    • Infiltrated_ad8271@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Just because it’s theirs? I figured it would be because of an alleged gender issue, for the same reason some are trying to do away with whitelists/blacklists and the like.