On Apr 22, 2011, at 12:26 PM, Jed Brown wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 18:53, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> Rather than use an outdated tool that uses an outdated display model ("real
> man pages") can you not find an "our editors" that "could automatically
> display the formatted" HTML "page when we are typing slowly in the body of a
> function".
>
> Yes, we can do this too, but it involves another user configuration variable
> for where to find the relevant pages where as man pages already have an
> established index. Also, man pages are somewhat more structured so it's
> easier to display only the most relevant parts. And man pages work across
> different libraries instead of needing to look in a different index when
> typing slow within the body of calls to each of PETSc, MPI, Lapack, pthread,
> etc.
In other words the older technology is better than the newer technology, not
an uncommon occurrence.
I'm fine with you hooking up traditional man pages, but note that we shove a
bunch of stuff into the .html manual page that sowing doesn't directly handle.
So likely the traditional man pages would be different.
Barry
>
> Surely emacs is not so outdated that they cannot use our html manual pages
> in this role?
>
> Emacs may be totally outdated, but it can certainly do this.
