[haiku] Re: Man
- From: Christoph Thompson <cjsthompson@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2010 23:27:04 +0200
Hi,
I fully agree with Euan Kirkhope. Haiku is a desktop OS and therefore
reading
documentation inside a terminal is (mostly) pointless. If people want to be
console gurus there is a huge choice of OSen out there to meet their needs.
A console 'man' should never be added to haiku in the default install. Only
as
an optional component. As it will only encourage people to see Haiku as yet
another UNIX clone. And as habits die hard and people are lazy, it would
only
deter them from providing documentation in the appropriate format for Haiku
(I guess that would be HTML).
Should a man page renderer be chosen, I think 'groff' should be avoided at
all
costs. Like a lot of GNU software, it's a huge mess (for our french speaking
friends here, the expression 'une usine à gaz' would be appropriate ;) ).
'mandoc' is small and self-contained. And it is available under a BSD
license.
Furthermore, it would even be better if mandoc could be built as a shared
library and used to render man pages in WebPositive. One could type for
instance 'man://ls' or 'man://ls:1' in the address bar and get a nicely
formated man page. Life is just too short to mess with the command line to
read man pages.
On a side note and to keep things simple and elegant, it would be cool if
WebPostive — alongside manual page support — had native PDF support like
Chrome
is going to get soon enough. Because there's just no need for one seperate
application for each document format. This is just confusing to the user.
And
also, if I'm not mistaken, BePDF is based on the sources of Xpdf whose
codebase
is ancient compared to Poppler. Porting Poppler to Haiku would improve PDF
support leaps and bounds and bring it on par with what's available on
UNIX-like
OSen. WebPositive would ideally have plug-ins to render different kinds of
document formats, which would make it extensible when a new document format
comes on the block.
Have a nice day (or evening),
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