Hi, right now I found a problem, when I try to encourage people to use ptxdist for private or commercial projects - the lack of man pages.
I know, it is intentional to save precious memory on embedded devices with usually small flash devices storing the firmware. 'Small' ment something in the few MB range running compressed MTD filesystems. The ability to create small rootfs images was basically my primary reason to use ptxdist many years ago, when I had just 32 MB of flash for all and everything. However the smart phone boom of the last few years dramatically changed the definition of 'small' - the smallest flash devices for our embedded HW starts now around 2-4 *Giga*bytes. And as smallest does NOT mean cheapest, the standard flash device at work - right now - is 4 GB eMMC, which will probably increase the usual 2^n steps the next months/years. And with this change the following question is now poping up over and over again: Why using a crippeled rootfs without man pages just to save some few MB out of several 1000s? So I would like to propose to add some global switch to the ptxdist configuration, which optionally allows users to install docs. Docs usually mean man pages, but options for info or similar would be fine, too. And of course a set of macros for the targetinstall stage, which conditionally picks up man pages at the usual places, when enabled. This optional feature (even if it is used just for the primary development and fieldtest stage) would be extremely helpful. Esp. for those not knowing all unix commands by heart, or with fresh stuff like systemd, which provides all documentation in form of >200 man pages. Right now people need to use a secondary virtual machine or a webbrowser to read man pages online, which is a bit ridiculous. So I would like to add such feature to Ptxdist and volunteer to add appropriate macros to the existing packages. At least as long as there is some positive feedback for this idea at all. Your opinions? Carsten -- ptxdist mailing list [email protected]
