[haiku] Re: Man

  • From: Christoph Thompson <cjsthompson@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2010 07:28:38 +0200

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 6:38 AM, Ben Allen <ben.allen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Keep in mind that people would be using man to read manual pages for
> *console* commands.  We're not talking about using man pages as the
> primary documentation source for the system.  A normal GUI application
> would not be providing documentation in the form of man pages.  The
> people that use man would already be using the terminal, so being able
> to access documentation directly in the terminal would, to borrow the
> idea of your final paragraph, be less confusing to the user by not
> requiring them to launch a separate application just for viewing
> documentation.


Most of the time people will start a new terminal just to view man pages
(except
when they are connected remotely). Because most people want to be able to
read the manual page at the same time as they are messing with something
else.
I don't see a great deal of difference here between reading stuff from the
terminal
or from a GUI application.


> Plus, opening documentation in a separate applicatio
> might not always be possible, for example when connecting to a system
> remotely via ssh.


If you connect remotely to a system and if it is a UNIX-like, then you get
to
use the remote system's man system. There's no need for Haiku to have
one. But I guess you are referring to the use case where someone would
connect to a Haiku system through ssh. Why would they need to do that
in the first place and why would they be reading man pages when doing
that ? Haiku is not aiming to be a terminal server. Besides if there really
is a need for reading docs from the console, why not use a console
web browser such as elinks instead ? BeOS was all about getting rid
of legacy stuff.

If a user preferred to view documentation in a web
> browser, then this is certainly also possible thanks to utilities like
> man2html (perhaps it would be useful to add an extra command-line
> option to man that automatically runs man2html and opens the resulting
> page in a web browser).


I don't think using man2html is a good idea. Hardcoding command
line apps into a program is really a nasty way of doing things. 'mandoc'
provides static libraries which could be compiled to shared libraries and
used instead. And the 'man' command could be just a symlink to the
WebPositive binary for example.

Another point is that most people don't use 'man' because they're using
Windows anyway. And Windows has survived and prospered pretty well
without man pages.

Have a nice day,

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