Hi Roland,
you wrote:
>
><rant>
>Long ago I suggested to use DocZilla (see http://www.doczilla.com)
and
>merge it with the Mozilla/Seamonkey shipped with Solaris. That
would've
>resulted in a DocBook/SGML capable browser+email client (at least in
the
>browser team noone really cared and now Sun seems to be more addicted
to
>the FireFox/Thunderbird combo (ignoring the resource-consuming
madness
>of running TWO Gecko engines (=FireFOX AND ThunderBird) instead one
one
>(e.g. Mozilla (alias Seamonkey)))). Somehow I still feel that this
may
>be the better way (it would avoid most of the messy+lossy
transforming
>and would deliver an all-in-one, DocBook/SolBook-capable browsing
tool
>(Ok... this doesn't cover tools like /usr/bin/man...)) ...
></rant>
Ok, I had not thought about just a browsing tool, buthave been focused
on something for editing purposes. Thanks for the link, I'll check it
out.
>
>Beside this rant... there are some tools to transform SGML<--->XML
forth
>and back... unless I am missing something there should be no
limitation
>of using a mix&match combination of such tools...
Right, we are converting our SolBook to DocBook currently with success
for the books. But, because of the volume of man pages, and volume of
changes to man pages, paying the price of conversion for each change
is just not acceptable and is unlikely to work long-term. But, I'm
open to ideas...
>
>> That is the reason
>> we've worked on the SolBook DTD to make it XML-compatible so it,
and
>> our source files, will be useful with free tools. These things take
>> time, I do appreciate your patience. I will deliver this new DTD
with
>> test files as soon as I possibly can.
>
>Ok...
>
>> I do remember that ksh93 man page request also. The file will never
be
>> delivered as open source due to legal constraints outside our
control.
>> Unfortunately, in some cases we will miss an opportunity for
>> participation in favor of caution, but hopefully we can get past
it.
>
>What was the problem in the case of the japanese manual page ? Why
can
>you ship the nroff code but not the SolBook one ?
We are not shipping nroff for japanese ksh man page with CDDL, as far
as I know. We cannot license that content under CDDL for legal
reasons.
>My idea was to allow them droped-in as-is, e.g. without
modifications.
>Would that be possible, too ?
I can't be sure until we try, but I think it should work. DocBook
allows many more tags than SolBook, so that could cause some need for
modifications.
>
>> But,
>> there is a potential project in here because the man command reads
>> nroff.
>
>Mhhh... yes... my current wishlist includes:
>- Improved table support (for example using the unicode graphics
>charaters if the locale is one of the *.UTF-8 ones).
>- /usr/bin/man should format the text for the current window width
(and
>get an option to override this)
>- Direct DocBook ---> text transformation
>- Think about a way to integrate a text-browser like "w3m" into the
>manual-page subsystem (e.g. this would allow an user to travel
through
>references to related manual pages etc.)
>
>Finally:
>I have a patch for /etc/profile floating around which properly sets
>$MANPATH based on $PATH , including locale/language-specific manual
>pages. In our environment we use something like
>-- snip --
>pathtomanpath()
>{
>(
> sep="" ; echo "$PATH" | tr ":" "\n" |
> while read i ; do
> i="$(dirname "$i")" \
> mdl="${i}/man/${LANG}" ; [ -d "${mdl}" ]
>&& printf "%s%s" "$sep" "${mdl}" && sep=":" ;
> md="${i}/man" ; [ -d "${md}" -a "${md}" != "${mdl}"
]
>&& printf "%s%s" "$sep" "${md}" && sep=":" ;
> done
>)
>}
>
>PATH=/opt/onbld/bin:/opt/SUNWspro/bin:/usr/ccs/bin:/usr/dt/bin:/usr/o
penwin/bin:/usr/sfw/bin:/usr/xpg6/bin:/usr/xpg4/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
>MANPATH="$(pathtomanpath)"
>export PATH MANPATH
>-- snip --
>(the final code should only set ${MANPATH} if not set yet and should
not
>set ${PATH} ; the function is used that people can override $PATH in
>their ~/.profile but use the function to update $MANPATH (this will
only
>work for login shells and not for all interactive shells))
>
>The idea is to travel along the entries in ${PATH} and check whether
>there are manual page subdirs in the same location, including
>locale-specific versions (for example /usr/man/ja_JP.UTF-8/). This
>catches all the special pages (compiler, desktop, add-on packages
etc.)
>and even honors the lookup order as used by ${PATH}.
>
>Is anyone interested to sponsor such a patch ?
Oh, this is a great wish list! Thank you so much, I will hunt down a
sponsor and get a conversation started about this patch.
-Michelle
>
>----
>
>Bye,
>Roland
>
>--
> __ . . __
> (o.\ \/ /.o) roland.mainz at nrubsig.org
> \__\/\/__/ MPEG specialist, C&&JAVA&&Sun&&Unix programmer
> /O /==\ O\ TEL +49 641 7950090
> (;O/ \/ \O;)
