From owner-freebsd-current Sun Sep 3 11:12:03 1995 Return-Path: current-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.FreeBSD.org (8.6.11/8.6.6) id LAA24137 for current-outgoing; Sun, 3 Sep 1995 11:12:03 -0700 Received: from time.cdrom.com (time.cdrom.com [192.216.222.226]) by freefall.FreeBSD.org (8.6.11/8.6.6) with ESMTP id LAA24131 for ; Sun, 3 Sep 1995 11:12:01 -0700 Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by time.cdrom.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) with SMTP id LAA00560 for ; Sun, 3 Sep 1995 11:11:58 -0700 To: current@freefall.FreeBSD.org Subject: lynx in /usr/src/usr.bin/lynx; any objections? Date: Sun, 03 Sep 1995 11:11:58 -0700 Message-ID: <558.810151918@time.cdrom.com> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Sender: current-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk We need a documentation browser for handling local copies of the HTML docs. The GNU `info' utility is nice for reading info files, but that's *all* it's good for and it appears that HTML has "won" this particular battle anyway. If we had lynx as a standard part of the system, any utility wanting to "bring up a help screen" would be able to count on having lynx around on the standard system for displaying it. For that matter, we could rename "info" to "ginfo" and then replace "info" with a wrapper that was intelligent enough to invoke "ginfo" or "lynx" depending on the input. It's not that hard to tell info files and HTML files apart, and doing something like this would give a us one simple "info" command that users could invoke on any doc file that looked interesting. Either that or we could convert all of our GNU info files to SGML files and keep just one type of docs reader around, but I don't know what the current state of the art in info->SGML translation technology is so I can't really comment on the viability of this option. However, I'll not bring any of this in until the "anti-bloatists" have had a chance to comment. Any strong objections? Any strong agreement? Jordan