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Date: Tue, 07 Aug 2007 12:10:45 -0700
From: Brian Dessent <brian AT dessent DOT net>
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Subject: Re: Looking for man pages
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Bob McConnell wrote:

> This is not exactly a cygwin question, but can anyone point me to a
> decent man page about writing Makefiles for GNU make 3.81? I tried to
> use info, but can't make heads nor tails of the navigation methods for
> that atrocity.

The 'info' program has a long history of being either loved, hated, or
mildly tolerated.  I'm not going to wander into that flamewar, but I
will point out that arguing about the 'info' program is missing the
point of the texinfo format completely.

The idea behind texinfo is a format-independent way of writing
documentation.  'info' is just one of a million ways to view this same
documentation.  You can also view it in html using your favorite
browser, e.g. <http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html>. 
There are a half a dozen other formats here:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/>.

That you don't like using 'info' is no excuse at all to dismiss the
texinfo documentation, which for the projects that use it (notably all
the official GNU projects) is typically fairly extensive -- much more so
than any man page.

Brian

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