Mike Gerdts wrote: > On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 11:56 AM, Darren Reed <Darren.Reed at sun.com> wrote: >> It occurs to me that catman might be well suited to a "run-once" >> style SMF service... > > There was some discussion about this a while back... > > http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/pkg-discuss/2008-May/003339.html > http://cr.opensolaris.org/~mgerdts/windex-service/ > > I stopped pursuing this when I had some private email from another > contributor indicating he was on the cusp of a proposal (in cahoots > with the documentation community) to do an overhaul of man(1) and > friends. That private thread went quiet in October and to the best of > my knowledge the proposal has not been made public.
A couple of thoughts... First, discussions about improving things should be public so that we have transparency and can easily coordinate effort. Without that, what you're referring to might be about as credible as a politician's promise. I mean what does "an overhaul of man and friends" mean? Regardless of what replaces man as utility to read documentation, having an index and being able to search that is incredibly valuable. Somehow that building that index will need to be executed after the operating system and/or software is installed. Second, there are some architectural differences between what you're proposing vs what I suggested, although I'd be happy for you to pick up with it and run (and I get the feeling that if you did the work and proposed a PSARC case, it might run further than you suspect.) What I see as being most important is to have the scanning of manual pages driven through explicit action rather than just scanning directories. The reason for this is the impact to the time it takes the system to boot up and "be ready." More directories will take longer. Thirdly, there should be a separation between the directories from which man pages are used to build an index vs the directories in which man pages are searched for (think applications installed and made available via NFS.) For this reason, I think that $MANPATH isn't the best to use for the list of places to index. Darren
