Re: [ANNOUNCE] GIT 1.5.3-rc4

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Aug 4, 2007, 19:03 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0708041156550.5037@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <85myx7dwb3.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>

On Sat, 4 Aug 2007, David Kastrup wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> >
> > You must be kidding. Texinfo is the worst documentation format EVER.
> 
> Oh come on.  It was the first hyperlinked and hierarchical format
> before HTML even existed.

Yes. And it should have died after html took its place.

> Actually, a decade ago the Emacs-internal info reader was worse than
> it is now.

Wow. I've used the emacs one, and the stand-alone info one, and both are pretty horrid. You're saying that they used to be _worse_?

(Admittedly, my GNU emacs-fu is very weak. I use an emacs-like editor, but it's just an editor, and it's subtly different, so I actually find the "real" emacs to be really disturbing on so many levels ;)

> [ structure ]
>
> And as opposed to AsciiDoc, there _are_ readers that make use of this
> information.

None that any normal user would want to use.

The thing is, html does a much better job of all of that, simply because there are useful readers. The same, btw, goes for man-pages: even though they have no structure at all, just the fact that normal people know how to use them, they are actually superior to info pages!

That's something that the FSF seems to have missed in their push for info format: a lot of FSF programs have really substandard man-pages, but that doesn't mean that people read the info ones _anyway_. Because the readers are so disgustingly horrible, plain man-pages are actually much more useful, despite the fact that they don't have any cross-referencing etc.

		Linus