Re: Move GNU manual pages to the Linux man-pages project

[Collin Funk <collin.funk1@gmail.com>]

Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org> writes:

> Hi Pádraig,
>
> On Sat, Sep 20, 2025 at 06:01:21PM +0100, Pádraig Brady wrote:
>> > > All of the man pages have links to the info docs for full documentation.
>> > 
>> > I know.  However, many users don't enjoy the info docs.
>> 
>> I my experience user don't enjoy the info _reader_, while the docs are fine.
>> The full docs are on the web though and also linked from each man page.
>
> Yeah, the info online docs are much nicer.  However, I (and others)
> don't enjoy going online for documentation, when offline documentation
> is available.

I wish distributions installed the HTML docs to
/usr/share/doc/coreutils, or somewhere similar (and substitute package
name for other packages). The gnu.org site is down or takes ages to load
frequently nowadays.

That said, I have seen complaints about the Coreutils man pages being
"incomplete". However, it is grown on me personally. I use the man pages
as a quick reference when I want to find an option or understand what it
does. And the info page for examples and/or commentary that is too long
to reasonably fit in --help.

Writing all of that in groff would be a pain. More of my time would be
spent understanding the syntax than it would be focusing on the content.
Texinfo's syntax is much more readable and easy to remember. And the
HTML and PDF output look nice to read.

I guess Markdown or reStructuredText would be more friendly to new
contributors since many do not know Texinfo. However, I haven't seen
good PDFs generated by them (though I concede that I very well could be
unaware of examples).

Collin