windvi 0.54

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Wed, 23 Sep 1998, Michael Grant wrote:

> In general, I disagree with the whole concept of making a Windows
> machine look like a Unix box.

That was not the goal of my suggestion.  The goal was to make it possible 
for you to read the documentation of the programs that you download and 
install.  Since these programs are developed for Unix, much of their docs 
is in format that is readily readable with Unix tools, and a release that 
doesn't come with similar tools, or at least says where to get them if 
you need them, effectively prevents you from using these tools 
efficiently.

Gawk and Perl are not required for this, btw; only Info and man.

> Man is quickly growing obsolete; HTML or PDF is the way to go on
> documentation these days, in my opinion---or, at the very least, some
> sort of markup language that is easily converted to HTML.

I suppose that's why your message was also with HTML tags, right? ;-)

Look, you can keep on dreaming about somebody to sit down and make the
titanic job of converting the docs to the format of your liking, but I
suspect you will wait forever for this to happen.  If I am not mistaken,
Fabrice didn't have enough time to document even the Win32-specific
aspects of the programs, let alone to convert existing docs to HTML or its
ilk. 

Another alternative is to give up and not read the docs at all (as it 
seems to be the fashion with many Windows users), but some people don't 
like to be blind...

On balance, having ports of the relevant Info browsers seems to be the
best compromise.  I'm using such ports for years, and I cannot imagine why
would people object to having them available, for those who would like to
actually read the docs.