Path: utzoo!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!convex!usenet
From: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
Newsgroups: alt.sources.d
Subject: Re: The Answer to All Man's Problems (part 0 of 6)
Keywords: man perl
Message-ID: <1991Jan08.024036.18957@convex.com>
Date: 8 Jan 91 02:40:36 GMT
References: <1991Jan07.220902.9726@convex.com>
Sender: usenet@convex.com (news access account)
Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
Organization: CONVEX Software Development, Richardson, TX
Lines: 35
Nntp-Posting-Host: pixel.convex.com

I have been asked whether my program will run in harmony
with other man programs on the same system.  While the 
answer is generally yes, it does depend on how your vendor
does things and how you config the man program.  I do keep
the text whatis files around, so the old apropos should still
work (and better -- see the paper), but if your site is
expecting /usr/lib/whatis instead of /usr/man/whatis, you'll
need to make a link, as I always keep whatis files in the 
applicable man tree.

If your system is set up to leave the catpages with embedded
escape sequences, then you might want to define UL instead of COL.
This is inferior behavior, so if you can get away with not 
doing it, you'll be happier.  Some versions of xman leave 
the escapes there.  To get rid of this nasty behavior, make
this change to the xr4/mit/clients/xman/defs.h file:

    102c102
    < #  define FORMAT "| neqn | nroff -man"        /* The format command. */
    ---
    > #  define FORMAT  "| neqn | nroff -man | col" /* The format command. */

There are several reasons you don't want those escapes, but
the biggest one is that it will run faster if you don't 
need to run through ul or col when viewing, and it allows
your pager to know the true name of the catpage (unless 
compressed) which looks nicer, conveys information to you,
and allows it to back up as far as you want.  I use less
as my pager.

If you switch over from the UL to COL behavior on your system,
you will want to blow away all the old catpages, since they'll
have those nasty escapes in them.

--tom