On Wed, Jul 16, 2025 at 12:57:03AM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote: > This feature still needs work: > > * At what point do we run the hook - before checking for man pages, > or after? E.g. if "tar.info" is not installed but the tar man page > is installed, should "info tar" run the hook, or display the man > page (or somehow run the hook and then display the man page afterwards)? > More than one hook, or options passed to hooks, might be necessary to > accommodate all the possibilities.
My feeling is that links to man pages as primary source of information is rare (except when already in a man page), in general man pages are used when an info manual is missing. So my advice would be to run the hook first and display the man page afterwards. We could also provide some code that checks for the man page existence like info would do, such that hook writers can use that code to return without doing anything in case they prefer man pages. > * Do we want to provide a default implementation of the hook referring > users to download manuals from <https://www.gnu.org/manual/manual.html>? I am not sure that it would be right to do that on all platforms. On platforms with packaging systems this is probably not a good advice. On platforms without packaging systems, this could make sense. Maybe the default hook could be a configure option? In any case, we could provide code snippets (if relevant) and ideas to hook writers to lower as much as possible the bar to make use of the feature. -- Pat
