On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 07:11:23AM -0500, Paul Alfille wrote:
> Yes, the man pages have issues.
> 
> Not necessarily with the content, but it's an archaic system on many
> levels. Still, man pages are short, consistent, familiar, and "easy"
> to write. In theory they are portable and usable even on systems with
> just a text console.
> 
> 1. I probably should have made all the man pages for slaves as ".5"
> instead of ".3"
> 2. There is a lot of duplicated content (which is desirable, so the
> interface and function of the salves and programs  have many common
> elements). Rather than try to modify all the pages each time, I use
> the source inclusion ".so" function.
> 3. This breaks the debian installation, so a special script is run on
> installation using sed to substitute the content into the original
> before packaging.
> 4. The sed script used gnu extensions, so an ed script was needed
> instead for Mac and BSD.
> 5. The website man pages are made by man2html which has some
> translation problems.
> 6. The content management system sometimes screws up the embedded
> links for the man pages so they are occasionally misfiled.
> 
> After "make install", the man pages are supposed to be installed in
> /opt/owfs/man/...
> 
> Personally I use midnight commander (mc) to view the man pages in the
> source tree. It seems to mange the links just fine.
> 
I just want 'man owfsxxx' to work, and it doesn't, even after adding the
/opt/owfs/share/man directory to the MANPATH database.  The trouble is
all those wierd xxxx.1so manual pages seem to throw a spanner in the
works.  Can you point me at anywhere that describes how it's supposed to
work - then maybe I can mend it and actually read the owfs
documentation. 

Why doesn't it just use ordinary symbolic links?

.... and why are there manual pages called things like help.1so, that's
inevitably going to cause problems.

I've been programming and using Unix and Linux systems since the 1980s
and I've never come across these .1so manual pages before.  It's almost
impossible to Google for any help because one gets zillions of hits on
ISO-8859 and such which mask any useful information.

Sorry, I've had a bit of a bad day today and having got owfs working
last night it's very frustrating not being able to make more progress
because of an inability to read the man pages.

-- 
Chris Green

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