Re: On being web-friendly and why info must die

[David Kastrup]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:

> David Kastrup writes:
>
>  > This discussion seems a bit surreal since
>  > 
>  >     gnome-open info:emacs
>  > 
>  > already opens a help browser on the Emacs documentation.
>
> OK, but "info emacs" is shorter and works on all my platforms (none of
> which have gnome-open installed, all of which have info in /usr/bin,
> including the BSD-based ones -- exception of course is Windows, which
> isn't "my" platform and I did have to explicitly install info there).
>
> OTOH, neither "xdg-open info:emacs" nor "open info:emacs" do anything
> useful.

xdg-open does here (basically same as gnome-open).  And, uh, open is
something else entirely:

Usage: open [OPTIONS] -- command

This utility help you to start a program on a new virtual terminal (VT).

Options:
  -c, --console=NUM   use the given VT number;
  -e, --exec          execute the command, without forking;
  -f, --force         force opening a VT without checking;
  -l, --login         make the command a login shell;
  -u, --user          figure out the owner of the current VT;
  -s, --switch        switch to the new VT;
  -w, --wait          wait for command to complete;
  -v, --verbose       print a message for each action;
  -V, --version       print program version and exit;
  -h, --help          output a brief help message.


> Note that "info" doesn't need to be info in the future; it can be a
> program that does the right thing with program names (ie, translating
> them to URLs to hand to a browser).

Sure.

-- 
David Kastrup