On Thu, 6 Jan 2022 at 02:28, Howard Gibson via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

I am updating my UNIX Command Line HOWTO. I have a remark in my text to the effect that man pages contain text stating that man is obsolete, and that you should use the info pages instead.

I actually have not seen this lately. What is the status of man and info at the moment?

I think the intention (20 years ago?) was that 'info' should replace 'man'. I can understand, even appreciate, the idea: it allows linking, multiple documents per command, and is a "richer" format. Unfortunately, the reality was that the uptake was awful because most of us (I include myself in "us" here) hated 'info' and didn't use it because we couldn't remember the multiple awkward commands required to interact with it. I open a man page, I scroll - done. I opened the man page because I wanted to learn about the command whose man page I opened - I don't want to have to learn about 'info' before I can learn about any other command ... The people behind 'info' stuck to their guns for a decade or more, but I think the whole thing has pretty much given up the ghost at this point. This is based on my own limited observation and opinion, not any actual research. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com

info was only ever a Gnu thing, and there are as many people who'd do the opposite of what the FSF would say on principle. A major strike against info is its reliance on texinfo,  its own weird markup language. texinfo also has dependencies that run into the gigabytes, since installing texinfo will also install TeX Live, the now-vast TeX system for Linux. tbh, I'm surprised that something better than man hasn't come along. But you can write manpages in anything (rst, markdown, LibreOffice ...) and have them converted to man pages via packages like pandoc — https://pandoc.org/ . But when you need PDF output, TeX is lurking in there somewhere. I recently spent time debugging why a major embedded project never came with a PDF manual, despite their docs being managed in Sphinx. It turns out that there's one instance of a Unicode omega / Ohm symbol in their entire document base, and their Sphinx PDF rules aren't Unicode-aware. At least its better than Microsoft, whose embedded docs are essentially just Bing searches. cheers,  Stewart