[cytzol]

GNU's stance on man pages is entirely correct! For real documentation, read the info page, but you rarely want real documentation, you just want a quick example or the command-line invocation syntax, or what a particular argument does. And 99% of the time, that will be in a man page.

The problem lies when you want to find something 1% of the time, and it's here that man pages become sprawling unindexed messes. For example, take a look at the man pages for perl or zsh: you'll have no chance finding anything, as those programs are so large that they need a wealth of documentation to go into them. At the same time, the info page for ls contains the things you rarely need to see such as exactly how things are sorted or the minute details of timestamp formatting. If this were all in the man page, you'd complain that you couldn't find anything in it.

[faboo]

I don't know, I always found the perl and zsh man pages to be rather pleasant. They were sprawling, sure, but having long ago given up on brevity, they have no fear of meticulously describing how a feature or flag works. And they're just man pages, so you don't need to read the manual-for-the-manual first like I always find myself doing when I'm forced to use info.