Manpages as "worse is better"? Them's fighting words :) I think it's more an example of how GNU isn't Unix, for better and for worse[1][2].
Info seems to be deeply integrated with the Emacs mindset, so coming from a different editor it's got some learning curve. Except it never seemed to be setup properly by default on a new server, and when I installed something new I'd never remember what I had to do to add it to the root page. Many's the time I tried to info for something and got.. its manpage, but in a crappier setting. Scanning a large manpage with '/' seems far superior to playing whack-a-mole with Info's tree structure. I don't want to sip documentation with a straw, just give me the firehose. (This is also why I prefer 'man zshall' rather than the trying-to-be-helpful sections of the zsh manpage. Who in god's name remembers which of those sections the factoid they're looking for is going to be in?)
All this would be surmountable if Info worked consistently out of the box. But the combination of encountering it only intermittently in working fashion meant that any lessons I learned quickly evaporated, and had to be repeatedly relearnt. I'm very happy now that GNU systems have given up on trying to make Info happen. Documentation quality is all about the quality of the content. Working on the tools instead of the content is classic bikeshedding.
(The one great advance in Unix documentation recently is git's approach of opening the man page when you type --help.)
Info seems to be deeply integrated with the Emacs mindset, so coming from a different editor it's got some learning curve. Except it never seemed to be setup properly by default on a new server, and when I installed something new I'd never remember what I had to do to add it to the root page. Many's the time I tried to info for something and got.. its manpage, but in a crappier setting. Scanning a large manpage with '/' seems far superior to playing whack-a-mole with Info's tree structure. I don't want to sip documentation with a straw, just give me the firehose. (This is also why I prefer 'man zshall' rather than the trying-to-be-helpful sections of the zsh manpage. Who in god's name remembers which of those sections the factoid they're looking for is going to be in?)
All this would be surmountable if Info worked consistently out of the box. But the combination of encountering it only intermittently in working fashion meant that any lessons I learned quickly evaporated, and had to be repeatedly relearnt. I'm very happy now that GNU systems have given up on trying to make Info happen. Documentation quality is all about the quality of the content. Working on the tools instead of the content is classic bikeshedding.
(The one great advance in Unix documentation recently is git's approach of opening the man page when you type --help.)
[1] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257
[2] http://landley.net/aboriginal/history.html