Info vs man [was: Playground pager lsp(1)]

[tomas]

On Wed, Apr 05, 2023 at 12:12:16PM +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 05, 2023 at 11:03:36AM +0200, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> > 
> > I was dreaming of a world where both doc systems converge
> > in a way their respective users don't notice, and we end
> > up with a Grand Unified Documentation (GUD) for all things
> > free.

First of all, sorry for hijacking the thread. I now changed
the subject accordingly.

I'm aware that the unification idea gets extremely messy in
the details. Thank you, Patrick, for going into some of them
so well.

Thanks also for the many references, that will make some
reading for the long weekend :-)

That said, I think the problem is as much a social as it
is a technical problem. You won't "win over" someone who
has been using man pages all the time and is happy with
it to info and vice versa.

Common authoring formats goes some of the way; enabling
viewers to "consume" other presentation formats, too
(because users haven't to change their preferred viewers).

Cross links is an interesting idea. What I've been mulling
about is "abstract links" (e.g. "the Curl documentation,
whatever format it happens to be in). Org goes some way
in this direction, but only in part.

> https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/Info-Format-Specification.html

Meta: this is a very nice example: I do have info on my
box. I'd much prefer to use that than the web browser
(an application I've learnt to hate more and more over
the last years). Of course, writing to a mailing list,
you've got to address the lowest common denominator,
and this is a Web URL these days (the URI was a good
idea with some issues, but was thrown under the bus).

As a thought experiment: what would it take for that
reference above to (also) open a local info viewer?

The technical part is easy: recognize the prefix and
substitute it. The exciting part is rather: we need some
rule set to "build" the URLs as the one above which is
sufficiently stable to build applications on top of that.

I think the XML folks had already some tidbits (e.g.
the "catalog" thing, which made it possible to abstract
whether a doc was local or remote).

Cheers & thanks
-- 
t

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature