I have been working on the Solaris man pages for over a decade and have followed this thread with interest.
It seems to me that there are two basic parts to this proposal; change the way MANPATH is defined/used and chnage the default PAGER to less. The latter seems to be generating the most controversy and I'm not qualified to comment beyond my own opinion as a single user. But the MANPATH probelm is one that has bugged me and the Sun documentation folk for some time. The current restrictive MANPATH behavior makes it very difficult to add man pages for products that do not have their man pages installed into /usr/share/man. As a result a lot of hacks and release notes have been created to help users find the man pages for that product. It seems to me that a fairly simple change to the man command's behavior to parse all .../bin directories in the user's PATH and look for a comprable .../man directory would go a long way toward helping users get the man page for any binary to which they have access. One other point of information that might be of interest. When we first switched over to SGML source for the man pages, the man command was enhanced to be able to recognize and process the sgml source. That was really the first step in a goal to make 'man' more user friendly as regards to navigation and enabled links. There is an old, approved PSARC case, 1998/294, which proposed to enhance the man command to allow display in a curses based viewer that would enable navigation and linking throught arrow keys. I believe there is something similar available in some forms of Linux, however this proposal would have used the original SGML source files. Dennis Evans -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
