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From: cwr@pnet01.cts.com (Will Rose)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Man pages
Message-ID: <7551@crash.cts.com>
Date: 14 Feb 91 03:56:03 GMT
Sender: root@crash.cts.com
Organization: People-Net [pnet01], El Cajon CA
Lines: 35


Peter Holzer suggests, in a reply to an earlier posting of mine, that
the formatted man pages be kept on line with the unformatted.  The
problems with this are firstly that in fact, the extra space *is*
significant; my Minix partition is 20MB and I suspect a good few 
users also run DOS and Minix, and are similarly limited for space.

Secondly, a short on-screen message (which is what the current 
so-called man pages produce) is a different animal to the fuller
description of the standard Unix man page.  There probably ought
to be two sorts of "man page" for Minix; a standard Unix man page,
fully formatted, and a short "help page" similar to the current
man page, using the help command of Minix 1.3 and earlier.  Or is
this just elaboration for the sake of it?

In fact, I've never been satisfied with the output of the Minix
formatters, and I'm not sure if it is something in the macro
libraries or in the programs themselves.  The screen output has
usually been off in one way or another.  Since a file, once
written for nroff, is very hard to de-nroff, I chose to stick to
straight ASCII and gain in size and speed.  Probably the time has
come to change this, and go to nroff and standard man pages.  The
286/386/68K boxes should have no problems, anyway.

Good luck - Will
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