From owner-freebsd-current Sun Feb 9 07:50:34 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id HAA21476 for current-outgoing; Sun, 9 Feb 1997 07:50:34 -0800 (PST) Received: from sax.sax.de (sax.sax.de [193.175.26.33]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id HAA21471 for ; Sun, 9 Feb 1997 07:50:30 -0800 (PST) Received: (from uucp@localhost) by sax.sax.de (8.6.12/8.6.12-s1) with UUCP id QAA23315 for freebsd-current@freefall.freebsd.org; Sun, 9 Feb 1997 16:50:29 +0100 Received: (from j@localhost) by uriah.heep.sax.de (8.8.5/8.6.9) id QAA13822; Sun, 9 Feb 1997 16:30:47 +0100 (MET) Message-ID: Date: Sun, 9 Feb 1997 16:30:47 +0100 From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) To: freebsd-current@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: 3.0-970124-SNAP: man page search order References: <10128.855488661@critter.dk.tfs.com> <19970209153631.SO02083@keltia.freenix.fr> X-Mailer: Mutt 0.55-PL10 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) In-Reply-To: <19970209153631.SO02083@keltia.freenix.fr>; from Ollivier Robert on Feb 9, 1997 15:36:31 +0100 Sender: owner-current@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk As Ollivier Robert wrote: > And Perl5 has solved this problem by dividing the old-fat manpage into > several manpages by subject... But this simply doesn't work, unless you already know what you're looking for, but in this case, you don't need the man page at all. :-) Get me right, i'm a great fan of Perl, but i haven't been able to make any use out of the Perl5 man page yet, much unlike the Perl4 one. Maybe Poul's idea isn't too bad, to split the Perl manual by functions, and drop them into a separate section. This could easily be the last section in the search order (Perl bigots are free to put a MANSEC in their environment moving it earlier), something like section `p'. But still i think, an HTML ref would be better, there you can search either by function name or by function group. But then, i really want the small and terse man page back! :-) -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)