From owner-freebsd-arch Wed Dec 12 21: 1:16 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mail.rpi.edu (mail.rpi.edu [128.113.22.40]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D919937B416; Wed, 12 Dec 2001 21:01:08 -0800 (PST) Received: from [128.113.24.47] (gilead.acs.rpi.edu [128.113.24.47]) by mail.rpi.edu (8.11.3/8.11.3) with ESMTP id fBD516M125682; Thu, 13 Dec 2001 00:01:06 -0500 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: drosih@mail.rpi.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <20011212001610.9AEA739EA@overcee.netplex.com.au> References: <20011212001610.9AEA739EA@overcee.netplex.com.au> Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 00:01:03 -0500 To: Peter Wemm , Nik Clayton From: Garance A Drosihn Subject: Changing 'man' to check alternate destination for 'cat' pages Cc: Greg Lehey , Warner Losh , ru@FreeBSD.ORG, ache@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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? <> 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? Should I try my hand at implementing my idea, or is someone else already looking into it? While I haven't tried writing any code yet, my intent is that 'man ' 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 //cat/thing.n, + if found, use it look for a 'cat' page at /var/man//cat/thing.n, if found, use it + see if /var/man//cat is an existing directory, + if so, then put the expanded 'man' page into that directory. otherwise put it in //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. -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message