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Re: [Groff] Effective manpages, a couple of thoughts


From: Pete Phillips
Subject: Re: [Groff] Effective manpages, a couple of thoughts
Date: Sun, 09 May 2004 21:51:04 +0100

Hi all. Hope you had a good w/e. 

(I've been decorating my youngest daughters room, so have had enough
Flamingo Pink and Sugared Lilac to last me the rest of my life! :-( )

Anyway .......

>>>>> "Larry" == Larry Kollar <address@hidden> writes:

    Larry> What do you think about the idea of having *both* a long and
    Larry> a short manpage for a complex subject, where each references
    Larry> the other? In other words, one is short, the other is
    Larry> complete. :-) 

Well, from my point of view, it wouldn't break my current working
practice, so seems reasonable. In principle I think it's a good idea,
but ......

I'm not sure how you would fit it into the accepted man page structure.

Perhaps 'man ls.s' for the short version, and 'man ls.l' for the long ?
(all we have to do is stop that practice of local man pages using the
'.l' suffix)             :-)

Hmmmm - also, if there was an ENV variable GROFF_MAN_PAGE_PREF you could
set to 'short' or 'long' you could set it to show you the pages you are
most likely to be interested in by default? That way, people like Ted
and I (who basically fire up man so they can trawl through it with
'less') wouldn't notice any difference.

Of course, this would be non-trivial - you need to get agreement from
the maintainer of the 'man' package as coding changes would be
necessary, from the Linux file system layout bods,....

Also, would it affect POSIX compatability ?  

Pete 


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