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Man Page Project Can Now Use Official POSIX Docs
Martin_Sturm writes "The IEEE consortium announces in a recent press release that it granted permission to the Linux Man Page Project to incorporate material from the official documentation on the POSIX standard. Obviously this is very good news for the Man Page project which now has access to a huge amount of good documentation. Until recently the project could not use this documentation due to copyright restricions."
Try reading info pages with "pinfo" instead of "info" - you'll like info pages much more when you've got a decent viewer =)
How would the 650 page GCC manual look as a man page?
Like it was done by someone who didn't understand the Unix documentation scheme.
The man pages were never the entire body of Unix documentation, just the first volume. The second volume consisted of longer, more tutorial or in depth documents for the programs that needed it. (Like some compilers, or awk, or [t]roff, etc.)
Way back in prehistory I worked with a port of Version 7 Unix (UTS) that came with a complete set of printed manuals -- the man pages were only half the documentation.
That said, info is lame, and commands that have no man page because they have info doubly so.
-- Alastair
The format is not info but texinfo, which produces output in many forms: TeX (for typeset documents), HTML, as well as info; furthermore, the man pages for many GNU programs are now produced by automatic conversion from the info source.
Texinfo beats roff format for man pages because it supports structure and hyperlinks. XML (or SGML) formats are even better, but "man format" sucks. And I've written a lot of "man pages" in my career.