Isn’t this amusing? Looks like RMS is entertaining the notion that
info documentation in some ways kind of sucks. To some people
anyway. Like me.
My feelings about this LWN article can be summed up by one of the commenters, rsidd:
So, what does info offer that HTML-ised manpages don’t? I have always been grateful for downstream projects like Debian producing manpages for all that GNU software. And for a quarter century now those info pages have been saying that man is outdated and info is preferred — amusing that even RMS is happy to see info go now, while man will certainly last another 25 years!
Another comment that I largely agree with is this by perlwolf:
The main drawback to info format is that it can only be read by the info program with its own nonsensical (to me) key bindings. Whereas man uses whichever pager I chose for all of my viewing of long texts with the key bindings I already know. A learning curve of zero wins by a factor of infinity. Every time I am forced to go to info to read documentation, I spend ten times as much time trying to figure out how to make it work than I do in reading actual documentation. So, I only use info as a absolute last resort.
As pointed out by commenters, pinfo is a massive improvement, but
still not sufficient and an indication of how deficient the core
info system is. It is funny how the comments supporting info are
so tone deaf about how cryptic the key bindings are. Sure "h" and "?"
for "help" seem easy and obvious, but as a Vim/less person, nope
they’re not. If there were a huge ecosystem of things that used those
bindings outside the Emacs world, sure maybe it’d be worth getting
used to (like the ridiculous but ubiquitous Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V bindings
for cut/paste).
It is funny how much of the attention was on slagging Info documents and how little of it focused on Asciidoc, good or bad. I have been using Asciidoc since 2006 and it has changed my life profoundly. Now, in addition to being as easy as possible to compose, all of my notes and documents are highly organized, absolutely consistent, and effortlessly published on the web. The custom software I wrote to create this blog revolves around the assumption of an Asciidoc core. To have enjoyed such features over 9 years with no forseeable expiration to its usefulness is not to be taken lightly. That’s probably how those Info document authors feel.