Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 00:01:03 -0500 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: Peter Wemm <peter@wemm.org>, Nik Clayton <nik@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.ORG>, Warner Losh <imp@harmony.village.org>, ru@FreeBSD.ORG, ache@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Changing 'man' to check alternate destination for 'cat' pages Message-ID: <p0510100bb83ddfa9e683@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <20011212001610.9AEA739EA@overcee.netplex.com.au> References: <20011212001610.9AEA739EA@overcee.netplex.com.au>
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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>>
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 <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.
--
Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu
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