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Navarre asks: "While I really like the GNOME desktop, and it's good to see that it's being taken up by HP and Sun, I noticed that it's a little weak on manpages. While I know that GNU prefers Info pages, I personally hate them and greatly prefer man. It's bad enough already when half the GNU apps I use refuse to give decent manpages in favour of info. Now GNOME includes help in HTML format, but no manpages that I've seen. Are we now at a point where we cannot survive on a Unix box without some kind of web browser? What happened to that great common-demoninator of a terminal, troff and a pager? The minimum bloat on Linux continues to increase, and I question if it's a good thing. How much trouble is it to include a manpage anyway?" I'm all for better documentation in formats that have richer functionality than troff, but let's not forget that man pages have worked for years and is still standard on just about every Unix system out there. I'm not as much of a fan of GNU Info, but that's probably more due to my familiarity with man than anything else. How do you all feel? Should we retire man for info or HTML (you can always use lynx)? Or do you think man pages still have a place on modern Unix systems?

On a side note, I'm sure maintainers who currently do not have man pages wouldn't mind it if someone out there would take the time to convert whatever has been provided into proper man pages.

Navarre writes: "Looks like Cowpland is on spin control now. Our least favorite Linux representative is now claiming that all's well in the Ottawa-based Corel. The story is here. Supposedly $25 mill in the bank and stable. Funny, but I just heard more people here in Ottawa had been laid off. Go fig. I hope Cowpland's correct though, since I have a friend trying to get work there." Maybe one of these days I'll write a huge feature on why Corel's financial difficulties had nothing to do with their Open Source strategy.