From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Eli Zaretskii To: Stan Shebs Cc: Andrew Cagney , gdb@sourceware.cygnus.com, ischis2@home.com Subject: Re: Merging manuals (was Re: How do you use GDB to debug GDB) Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2001 15:59:00 -0000 Message-id: References: <3AB7B697.CBAF2099@apple.com> X-SW-Source: 2001-03/msg00222.html On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, Stan Shebs wrote: > The arguments for merging are that it slightly simplifies document > maintenance, and more importantly that it facilitates the transition > from being a user of the tool to being a developer of it. There's another important consideration: the ease of finding information when you use the manual as a reference (as opposed to a textbook which is read in its entirety). The most efficient means of using a manual as a reference is the `i' command of the Info browser. (For those who don't know: that command looks up a string you type in the manual's indices, and in a well-indexed manual, will usually land you on the right spot in a matter of seconds.) If that fails, the next best alternative is `s' which searches the manual's text for a string or a regexp. By contrast, the facilities presented by today's Info browsers for searching multiple documents are abysmally inadequate. In the stand-alone Info reader, we have the --apropos option (which I'm quite sure some of the people here have never heard about); and we have nothing similar in Emacs. Also, please note that the chapters which describe annotations and GDB/MI are already very technical in nature and come very close to documenting the internals. So I think, on balance, merging the two documents would be a good thing.