Well, I think it's more that Richard Stallman was so ridiculously in love with ITS's documentation system (which was pretty good for its time, I admit) that he decided to clone it for Unix.
Could the bloat of GNU tools merely be a ploy by rms to force people into using info? :) John On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 8:10 AM, pmarin <pmarin.m...@gmail.com> wrote: > My theory is that GNU tools were so bloated by design that they > realized that they couldn't write a decent man page for their tools > so they invented the info pages and the --help flag. > > On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 1:25 PM, erik quanstrom <quans...@quanstro.net> wrote: >> On Fri Mar 25 07:52:10 EDT 2011, arn...@skeeve.com wrote: >>> I really like the GNU project's Texinfo markup language, which >>> sets on top of TeX, but you don't have to know TeX. (I've been using >>> Texinfo for > 20 years, but don't know any TeX.) >>> >>> I've written books in troff, Docbook/XML, and Texinfo, and Texinfo is >>> by far the easiest. >> >> i never could get past the fact that texbook reeks of hubris >> and nih, nor forgive gnu for using info as an excuse for not >> having man pages. that, and the fact that it's at least 100x >> slower than troff, and the reader requires cursor addressing. >> >> - erik >> >> > >
