Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 10:14:01 +0200 From: Ruslan Ermilov <ru@FreeBSD.ORG> To: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> Cc: Peter Wemm <peter@wemm.org>, Nik Clayton <nik@FreeBSD.ORG>, Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.ORG>, Warner Losh <imp@harmony.village.org>, ache@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Changing 'man' to check alternate destination for 'cat' pages Message-ID: <20011213101401.C77774@sunbay.com> In-Reply-To: <p0510100bb83ddfa9e683@[128.113.24.47]> References: <20011212001610.9AEA739EA@overcee.netplex.com.au> <p0510100bb83ddfa9e683@[128.113.24.47]>
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On Thu, Dec 13, 2001 at 12:01:03AM -0500, Garance A Drosihn wrote: > From the thread > Re: Getting rid of /usr file system (was: Using a larger block size...) > > > > On Tue, Dec 11, 2001, Garance A Drosihn wrote: > > > > In the land of weird suggestions, just how weird would it be to > >> > suggest that we create some way for 'cat' versions of man pages > >> > to land somewhere else? > > > > > > > > Maybe /var/man/usr/share/cat* > >> > for ones from /usr/share/man/man* > > > > etc? > > Given that Peter, Nik, and Greg expressed some interest, I thought it might > be interesting to try my hand at doing it. I looked at it for about 15 > minutes tonight, and noticed that 'man' is under gnu/usr.bin. Does that > imply changes for it should go thru gnu, somehow? <<shudder>> > No. > I noticed there are some changes to 'man' in release 5 which haven't been > MFC'ed yet. Would there be any reason those should not be MFC'ed? > Some of them can't be MFC'ed, some can be. Please be specific. :-) > Should I try my hand at implementing my idea, or is someone else already > looking into it? > Sorry, but I don't quite understand what are you looking at. We already have a manpath(1) facility, that could be used to configure alternate manual pathes. Is that not sufficient? > While I haven't tried writing any code yet, my intent is that > 'man <thing>' would do something like: > > search for the requested man page (same as it does now) > once it finds the location, then > + look for a 'cat' page at /<matchedpath>/cat/thing.n, > + if found, use it > look for a 'cat' page at /var/man/<matchedpath>/cat/thing.n, > if found, use it > + see if /var/man/<matchedpath>/cat is an existing directory, > + if so, then put the expanded 'man' page into that directory. > otherwise put it in /<matchedpath>/cat (as happens now) > > Does this sound about how people would want it to work? Basically the > idea is that it would work exactly the same as it does now, except for > the steps with a '+' on them. So, to get this alternate behavior people > would have to create the appropriate directories under /var/man (or > perhaps some other name), such as: > /var/man/usr/share/man/cat* > /var/man/usr/local/man/cat* > /var/man/usr/X11R6/man/cat* > > I haven't done any work on this yet, I'm just looking for feedback. > What's the goal of doing this? I missed the original thread. Cheers, -- Ruslan Ermilov Oracle Developer/DBA, ru@sunbay.com Sunbay Software AG, ru@FreeBSD.org FreeBSD committer, +380.652.512.251 Simferopol, Ukraine http://www.FreeBSD.org The Power To Serve http://www.oracle.com Enabling The Information Age To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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