Hi everyone.
Thanks Rainer, Darren, Dave and Shawn for your responses.
I started this thread to feel out the opinion on making this change.
Apparently it was a bigger deal than I thought...
Based on your responses and having talked with Alta of the documentation
group, it now seems best to leave things as they were and continue
delivering manpages with nroff dot commands to /usr/share/man/manXX.
Consistency with the (many) pre-existing manpages is the main reason.
nroff formatting has been the standard for manpages.
Another reason is that nroff still provides some benefit (per Rainer's
response). I didn't see this benefit myself, but again that's why I
asked a wider audience.
I now plan on leaving the slim_source manpages and their delivery as is.
Thanks,
Jack
On 06/ 3/10 01:56 PM, Jack Schwartz wrote:
Hi everyone.
While working a bug regarding beadm manpages (14550) I learned that
manpages deposited into /usr/share/man/catXX are displayed without
additional formatting. Those in /usr/share/man/manXX are formatted by
the man(1) command, and when they are, a copy of the formatted output
is put in /usr/share/man/catXX as part of the process. The catXX
files are used if man is run on the same inquiry again.
Currently our slim_source manpages are all put into
/usr/share/man/manXX. I think that if we put them into
/usr/share/man/catXX directly, we could do all of the formatting
ourselves and eliminate all of the dot (formatting) commands.
The benefit of this would leave the files as readable whether in the
gate or installed on the system. Lack of dot commands would make
maintenance of manpage sources easier.
A potential drawback to this approach is that font changes (i.e. Bold)
would be lost on some systems, but I'm not sure how much it matters
(hence this email). In Gnome there is no problem as these font
changes are not emitted to begin with. It may be that font changes
are lost only on old vt100-style terminals.
So my plan is to put dot-command-free, pre-formatted manpages into
/usr/share/man/catXX.
BTW, this follows the precident of the pkg team, which already does
this...
Maybe this is much ado about nothing, but please let me know if you
have any issues with this.
Thanks,
Jack
_______________________________________________
caiman-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/caiman-discuss
_______________________________________________
caiman-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/caiman-discuss
