Re: dired-man can't deal with compressed pages

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Juri Linkov <address@hidden>
> Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2004 23:59:29 +0200
> 
> > The canonical Emacs solution to such situations is to try running
> > `man' with the -l switch and see if it barfs.
> 
> Seeing how man barfs will not help to construct an alternative
> command line.

One obvious choice is to fall back on what we have in dired-x now, if
no one comes up with a better alternative.

> >> I think it's better not to duplicate what man already does.
> >
> > `man' doesn't do what we want except where it supports -l.
> 
> This is why I suggested that the user should be able to specify
> how to uncompress compressed man files (guznip, uncompress, etc.)

I think Emacs can decide that by itself.  It does for Info files.

> > ??? Is that even possible?  I thought all the preprocessors we need
> > (eqn, tbl, refer, and soelim) are always installed as part of the
> > standard Troff/Groff/man packages.  How else would users be able to
> > format the pages they have?
> 
> Could you assure that all these preprocessors are available for all
> man versions?

I think having `man' installed guarantees that, but I don't regard
myself as an expert on this issue.  Does anyone know if the 4
preprocessors mentioned above are guaranteed to be installed with
`man'?