cwr@pnet01.cts.com (Will Rose) (02/07/91)
On-line manuals.
du on the current man directory gives 336K: when the distribution was only
8 or so disks, this was probably significant. It's hard to see the problem
now. Having no unix experience, I found Minix was unusable without on-line
manuals for the commands, so when I got (1.2) I wrote my own in the standard
format. In due course ast posted some man pages for 1.4, and I updated these
for PC 1.5.10 commands and posted them. They are in various archives, or in
Guy Helmer's FD stuff. I imagine I'll do the same for 1.6.xx in due course.
By the way, if you are writing manuals, *PLEASE* do not use formatters such
as troff. They look lovely if you have the cpu cycles to spare, but they
bring the average XT clone to its knees. Further, none of the Minix
formatters (mroff, nroff, roff etc.) are especially compatible, tho' mroff
looks like a winner.
The state of the manual sections is:
O - needs work
1 - complete (see above)
2 - needs at lot of work
3 - complete (I think)
4 - needs a little work
5 - non-existent
6 - needs work
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
"If heaven too had passions | Will Rose
even heaven would | UUCP: {nosc ucsd hplabs!hp-sdd}!crash!pnet01!cw
grow old." - Li Ho. | ARPA: crash!pnet01!cwr@nosc.mil
| INET: cwr@pnet01.cts.com
UUCP: {nosc ucsd hplabs!hp-sdd}!crash!pnet01!cwr
ARPA: crash!pnet01!cwr@nosc.mil
INET: cwr@pnet01.cts.comhp@vmars.tuwien.ac.at (Peter Holzer) (02/12/91)
cwr@pnet01.cts.com (Will Rose) writes: >On-line manuals. > >du on the current man directory gives 336K: [...] >By the way, if you are writing manuals, *PLEASE* do not use formatters such >as troff. They look lovely if you have the cpu cycles to spare, but they >bring the average XT clone to its knees. Further, none of the Minix >formatters (mroff, nroff, roff etc.) are especially compatible, tho' mroff >looks like a winner. I think the cpu-cycles are not a problem. If the man directory is only 336k big you surely have enough space to hold both the nroff sources and the formatted man-pages online. The man command can then look for the formatted man-pages and display them directly. Only if the requested man-page is not present or older than the source file it needs to call nroff to format it. The incompatibility of various *roff's might be a bigger problem, but as we all use Minix, and Minix comes with nroff as standard text formatter we should all just use nroff (Just as we all use 13-bit compress to compress files we want to distribute, although there are programs that can compress better). -- | _ | Peter J. Holzer | Think of it | | |_|_) | Technical University Vienna | as evolution | | | | | Dept. for Real-Time Systems | in action! | | __/ | hp@vmars.tuwien.ac.at | Tony Rand |