Comment by DougMerritt
12 years ago
INFO is a Richard Stallman thing, it's a GNU thing, it is emphatically NOT a Unix thing.
Stallman wanted to replace the Unix thing (which was always man pages) with INFO, and for many years deprecated man pages, which is part of why many GNU man pages are sub-par.
Not that non-GNU man pages are perfect, but still.
As for Unix being intended to be a stop-gap, your impression is simply historically incorrect, aside from philosophical issues like the claims made in the infamous Gabriel essay "Worse is Better".
> I could be wrong though, but almost every utility in UNIX screams this to me.
Unix/Linux is certainly not perfect, but this simply reflects the truth of Henry Spencer's aphorism, "Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
People who think Unix got it all wrong, as opposed to merely having assorted warts, should read Raymond's "Art of Unix Programming".
I was more than a little startled that Raymond captured a lot of the truth of the subject; it's a good read, and can potentially make anyone a better programmer.
Edit: a more concise starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
+1
Info really sucks compared to decent man pages. Sun did good man pages, go look at them, they are quite good.
A lot of the man page hate can be traced back to crappy gnu man pages that were just trying to get you to use info.
Info is cool, it's sort of like a web in text, but it isn't a replacement for a decently written concise man page.