man tar:
The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create info documents instead. Unfortunately, the info document describing tar is licensed under the GFDL with invariant cover texts, which makes it impossible to include any text from that document in this man page. Most of the text in this document was automatically extracted from the usage text in the source. It may not completely describe all features of the program.
(Ubuntu 10.04)
Comments:
I have never understood this abhorrence. Frankly, I have yet to bother to learn how to use Info (or for that matter, Emacs, which it mimics), and find it irritating that I can't do a man xyz, followed by a /lookup something, and get all the info I need. Despite years of this nonsense of trying to force Info down our throats, it still has not taken hold. Nevertheless, they persist. One might be tempted to call them ideologues.
Personally, i think that this is just the emacs-vim debate carried over to help tools. But that is why most distros allow you to choose a man pager. Emacs makes a fine man pager (if you can tolerate the slow startup), and it would have been trivial for the info folk to adapt man to emacs to it rather than force-feeding us a new format.
Ah, info. How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.
Actually, using GNOME's 'yelp' command comes in great for info pages:
yelp info:tar
Which is interesting, because it's clearly the _exact_ same text as the tar manual.
What a world.
I should also mention, that if you are stuck behind a text-based terminal, and executing a graphical utility won't suffice, then installing 'pinfo' for all your info needs should greatly ease the pain of using info pages.
FYI.
Aaron: that's because the info documentation is not shipped in the Ubuntu package (for the same GFDL-is-not-free reasons), and info viewers fall back to man pages.
This is not something Ubuntu-specific; this is something Ubuntu inherited from Debian.
Leave a comment: