Comment by wichert
8 years ago
On many Linux systems there are likely to be more non-GNU commands than GNU commands, so I'm not sure your argument fully works here.
GNU historically never made man pages: they used Texinfo for documentation, possibly combined with a tool to convert Texinfo to man pages. That shows in the result: an entire manual all joined together in a single unreadably long manual page. The bash man page is a nice example of that. I'm not sure if the use of Texinfo is still a requirement for GNU projects.
The verbosity of the generated man pages for GNU software probably did influence a lot of non-GNU Linux software.
At least in bash 4.4, the manpage and the info page are two different documents.
Many GNU manpages are generated with help2man, which causes the opposite problem, i.e. they are too terse. (Also, their typographical quality is often low.)