Mail Archives: djgpp/1994/04/15/17:31:46
> Info is far superior to man, it would be more useful to
> spend time learning info than writing a info->man converter
> (which looses all the hypertext information).
Says who? :-)
Some background : I did the convertion from the preformatted Info to my
own man clone (which does not claim to be unix man compatible :) because
I am part of a team introducing djgpp to the Campus Network here at the
Uni I study at. The docs will also be ported at some point to the
University's own hypertext system, and these man pages make a good
intermediate format. (I also wanted them converted for personal use at
home. Info doesn't allow me to store files compressed, and I have trouble
with four heavyweight development systems installed (BC/DOS, BC/Windows,
GCC and VB Pro) on finding room for much else ... whereas my own system
does.)
Info is slow. Our network here is, to put it mildly, heavily overloaded.
Development work using GCC will be done under Windows. We have experienced
problems using GCC under pure DOS (maint 4 fixed that) and so at the
time we decided to produce a development environment for Windows. It's
also technically easier to do a Windows-hosted environment. So, using Info
would cripple performance, because Windows pages its memory across the net.
We don't have local hard drives. (As our environment hopes to shield
users from having to produce makefiles, I don't expect many people to use
Info here from outside Windows.)
Info is not user-friendly. Not compared to DOS/Windows software. Its
navigation soon becomes annoying. It doesn't support mouse (my version
of man happens to). And I'm not going to take the time to teach 1,200
undergraduates (plus staff who may be interested) how to use it. Not when
there are existing alternatives which people *are* familiar with. Plus,
I'm a student -- all of us behind this project are. We don't have time
to get a degree and teach. (Besides, at the time I was also Chairman of
our comp soc, which has enjoyed an average growth rate of 75 new members a
week, so that was keeping me somewhat busy too :)
The docs are hardly hypertext. Sure, there are the occaisonal link between
nodes, but it's nothing compared to your average Windows Help file. This
isn't knocking the docs. But the docs are basically a hierarchical menu.
Guess what else my man clone already does? :-) (I may produce Windows
Help files as a one-off after my exams - I've a sneaky suspicion the
continued unreliability of the Novell/DOS box code may force us to cut
down the number of concurrent DOS sessions to the minimum.)
Writing Info sources isn't worth my time. If I want pretty printing, I
have Word for Windows, which is very easy to use so long as you don't want
equations (although I'm told Word 6a fixes that one). For this sort of
documentation, standard dot matrix output is fine. Fancy printing is slow
on dot matrix's, and I'm not wasting laser toner on docs of this nature.
Time wasn't a problem. The convertion to over 400 individual text files
(I should clarify. I cheated, and unashamadly so. These aren't nroff
source files, coz the same arguements against Info apply to nroff as well.
These are pure ascii files) took me an afternoon, and most of that was
generating the necessary whatis databases for my man.
It's not like these are new, official docs to replace the current lot
either. In the documentation I've included (although I've still not
uploaded anywhere yet), I've made it quite plain that I don't support
these pages, there's nothing new, and that it'd be best all-round if
anyone who wants to write new docs talks to DJ and/or the GNU folks as
applicable, and I'll pick them up from them. I can't guarentee net access
beyond graduation in 11 weeks time, so I can't offer help with future
documentation. If I can find a job (haha! fat chance) so I can afford net
access (not cheap in the UK - we don't enjoy free local calls) them I'm
happy to contribute to the official port if DJ's interested. Although I
still use Borland (mainly for Windows stuff), GCC, with the DLL stuff and
being 32-bit :) (please DON'T suggest Borland 4 - I'm not spending my money
until it works :) offers facilities I can't get elsewhere, and I'm happy to
help out anyway I can.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree here. You use Info, and I'll use
man.
> tkman (on wish/tcl) is pretty nice (it applies heuristics
> to try to guess about which sections). But the hypertext
> links really aren't there.
>
> It may make a lot more sense to write info->help/help->info for windows...
Why not just convert info->WinHelp? I'm told that the replacement for
WinHelp will be backwards compatible. Personally, Stephen's idea of
porting to html interests me a lot more (and is also a lot less grief.
Writing Word macros to output .texinfo from user input is one thing, but
I'm not writing an info->RTF convertor!) and I *do* need a html browser
for DOS ... :)
There's also the case that Info is hardly a widely used standard. On the
unix systems I've seen, there are current man pages for GCC, GZIP et al.
I've not seen Info used outside FSF stuff either. Unix people use man,
DOS people use type |more :) and Windows users use WinHelp (for now).
> marty
Stuart
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