Date: Fri, 7 Apr 1995 13:23:00 +0800 (CST) From: Brian Tao <taob@gate.sinica.edu.tw> To: John Fieber <jfieber@cs.smith.edu> Cc: doc@freebsd.org, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Documentation Project Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.91.950407130511.17762H-100000@aries.ibms.sinica.edu.tw> In-Reply-To: <199504061614.MAA02149@grendel.csc.smith.edu>
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On Thu, 6 Apr 1995, John Fieber wrote:
>
> an html interface to the man command could be
> added. A tenative plan is to have lynx wired up as a "help"
> command pointing at the toplevel page.
Now I remember what it was I wanted to bring up over the past
week... :( I'd like to toss in another candidate for HTTP server,
with particular regard to this business of creating a friendly
documentation interface for our users. The server is WN and its home
page is at http://hopf.math.nwu.edu/.
It has several standard features which I think make it an ideal
engine to back-end our HTML documentation. The server itself can
perform a wide variety of searches, both context-based and index-
based, without farming out the job to a CGI. It is also capable of
merging two HTML documents together, e.g.: a standard display header
or a set of navigation buttons appended to the end of each man page or
search result. You can also assign a filter to any document, allowing
you to bring up raw man pages in HTML without need for a second set of
HTMLified ones wasting disk space. Again, it does this internally
without the aid of a CGI script.
I'll leave the details out of this message to keep it short.
Check out the Web page for full documentation and specifications.
Source code is, of course, freely available and has been placed under
GPL (for those who need to worry about such things). I should have
some time this weekend to play around with it, assuming I manage to
grab the source by then (FTP's running at 300 bytes/sec at the moment,
ugh...)
> Now, there are a number of sections that various volunteers in
> the doc group agreed to work on. I may be coming after YOU with
> a pointed stick soon! ;)
Waving of pointed sticks is a healthy thing here. :) It gets
things done and benefits the whole FreeBSD community. Thanks, John.
--
Brian ("Though this be madness, yet there is method in't") Tao
taob@gate.sinica.edu.tw <-- work ........ play --> taob@io.org
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