On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 4:33 PM, Peter Tribble <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Isn't the better way to get packages delivering manpages to deliver
> preformatted manpages and their windex (or some index, at least),
> and to have man just look at all the windex fragments? It seems
> silly for every user to have to rebuild all this when it should be supplied
> already done.

I'm partial to the suggestion at
http://blogs.sun.com/sch/entry/bespoke_services_application_catman to
have a service property that indicates whether pre-formatted pages are
created.

> (And having the man command use the index rather than traversing the
> filesystem hierarchy so it runs at acceptable speed would be good.)

And so many other things.  Perhaps odt templates and appropriate xslt
magic would be another good thing.  Personally, I would happily trade
the small performance hit for formatting a man page from time to time
than pay the performance hit during installation, restore, etc.
associated with millions of tiny files.  Imagine using a database that
has full-text search capabilites instead of apropos to find the right
documents.

But this is all way beyond the small step I am proposing to fix
something that is easy to fix without mucking with public interfaces
while we wait another few years for man to get smarter.

-- 
Mike Gerdts
http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/
_______________________________________________
pkg-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss

Reply via email to