I'll respond to several at once, here; I'll also avoid the religious fanatics' frothing over editors :-). Dave Howorth wrote:
...
Got so involved in my argument, I let that one slip by :-).
I guess you also missed the online man pages at sites like http://linux.die.net/man/. It has a top-level list with drill-down, explanatory pages, hyperlinks between related pages (both go-to and come-from).
Yep. I'd never heard of it at all. Thanks for the tip; it's really nice. Maybe even better than Konqueror.
You're criticizing man pages when what you're actually concerned about is the navigation and surrounding features. The concerns are orthogonal, please don't conflate them.
Not altogether orthogonal. As you and Joachim point out, xman and tkman provide a decent navigation method for raw man pages. I'd looked at xman many years ago, and just now looked at it again. I abandoned it then because it gives no description of the commands -- you get a list of thousands of strings with no way to see what any particular string means. Twenty-five years ago it wasn't much help; I had to struggle through books and/or beg for help from regular unix users. Even now most of the strings are meaningless to me. tkman is not on my machine; I'll look for it later tonight to see what it has to offer. linux.die.net/man/ goes a long way toward fixing that problem, although many of the descriptions are about as cryptic as the command names themselves :-). The nice thing about konqueror is that it's always available on my machine; the nice thing about die.net is that it's available wherever I have an internet connection. That's not the case on some of the Tru64 and Modcomp Classic machines I have to deal with, but many of them do have internet access. (I wonder whether the machines that won't compile anything newer than Netscape 3 will work with die.net.)
... I use man pages regularly and mainly the online copies. I find the suse-supplied browsers to be too much bother to use.
But, Dave, you already know it all. We don't. We need the help.
I'm with Linda. Keep man pages as they were! Follow the agreed, public standards. ...Making an application or web interface that encapsulates them and provides the functionality is a better direction, IMHO.
I agree wholeheartedly. But such is not yet available to us, with the slightly flawed exceptions of Konqueror and (now that I've learned about it) linux.die.net.
The real question to me is why John and Doug got involved in this issue? Why don't Konqueror and susehelp already cover their needs so comprehensively that they don't care about Linda's request?
Have my last two responses answered that question? Carlos E. R. wrote:
Arggh! you're right, Randall. I use it all the time. Doesn't help at work, where there's no kde, but at home, it's invaluable.
Then, try "pinfo".
john@embelex:~> pinfo bash: pinfo: command not found What does it do? Is it worthwhile for me to find and install it? Joachim Schrod wrote:
Having struggled for the last few days to learn more about HAL, ConsoleKit, and PackageKit, I would have loved if there would be man pages that are as succinct and precise as they are for standard Single Unix(tm) functionality. Instead one follows one Web site to the other with horrible formatting and unstructured information. There is a reason why POSIX followed the man page paradigms in its write up, there is even a rational in the standard.
No argument here, There's no good reason for web sites to have horrible formatting and unstructured information. Indeed, that's my beef with man pages -- often thousands of lines of text with no help finding what you want. Sure, there's primitive formatting, but it doesn't help those of us who don't already know it all.
Concerning curses implementation -- why not a GUI? For the old timers, there has always been xman and tkman, of course. Both also provide a browser for man pages.
I mentioned curses because it was already widespread when I first got into computing in the late '70's -- I had it on my CoCo I in 1982, and curses had just been introduced with Microware's OS-9 system for the CoCo. It was as close to a GUI as most systems could support. And did windowing and navigation pretty well. Now I use konqueror and, maybe, die.net. Don't really need curses. jp -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org