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No problems with ideology when it’s right. Bundling documentation with the tool in a standard text format is the way to go. This can easily be reformatted for online wikis, manuals, etc.

Agreed. And I've been accused of it before (here, by dang).

But my point was that the gnu ideology was pushing contributors to use info pages (which many of us (myself included) tend to not use.

So perhaps the ideology should be reexamined from time to time. In this case, it should be: how do we make sure documentation is of highest quality and availability to our users (I'm more than happy to be challenged on that).

In that case, it might be worth considering making man pages a first class citizen again, along with html, as those are the natural destinations a user turns to when looking for help.

Personally I never use either. If I want to know how to do something, my first instinct is to Google it or use ChatGPT. The information is a lot more easily compressed and searchable in a web browser than in CLI tools
If you know how to use info, it’s faster to find what you’re looking for than to use Google or ChatGPT. The interface is incredibly snappy and lets you do a full text search across the entire manual you are reading, quickly and without leaving the keyboard.

Not that there’s anything wrong with using Google or ChatGPT to find what you are looking for, but info is a fast way to get authoritative information, and the documentation is also mirrored on the web so it can be easily indexed by search engines and LLMs.

The information you find when using Google and LLMs has to originate somewhere. The original sources of information are best kept organized.
There is always README.md but having offline docs is always nice.

I think I would prefer we just ship folders of markdown or HTML that open with your editor/viewer of choice though.

No argument here, I'm just saying I don't tend to use primary sources
Assuming you always have convenient access to the internet. And that you version of the tool you are working with matches whatever result you find online.

And even then, often the best results you get from google come from the man or info page anyway.

My first search when googling documentation for a tool is often "man <toolname<"

I'd I don't have internet, I can't work, so it's moot at that point
I like to minimize the amount of time I spent with instant access to the web because too much instant access to the web is bad for my mental health. That's why I arranged things so that I don't need web access when I'm programming, and Info is a major part of my having been able to do that.
I just chose my most addictive sites and pointed them to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file. When I open the browser and my Brian instinctively opens them, I get nothing.

For home projects, I have microsoft's docs on C++ and C# downloaded locally, but for work I need to be connected to the internet to do my job

I do that, too, in addition to keeping my cable modem off while I am programming (with the result that I have to wait about 8 minutes from any decision to use or access the web to when the web actually starts to be accessible to me).

Thanks for telling me that microsoft's docs on C++ and C# can be cached locally. I tried to create local copies of some docs on web programming, but found out that it cannot be done with a reasonable amount of effort by people who are not already experts in web programming.

It's called "Help Viewer", you can install it with Visual Studio Installer
And might be wrong.
Yeah I'd say that chatgpt is wrong maybe 10 or 20% of the time. It generates old or straight up wrong information. You have to double check it against stackoverflow

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