Re: Accessibility of man pages (was: Playground pager lsp(1))

Alejandro Colomar <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.linux.man,gmane.comp.printing.groff.general,gmane.comp.tex.texinfo.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi Colin,

On 4/8/23 15:47, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 08, 2023 at 03:02:59PM +0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
>> Colin, I've had a feeling for a long time that compressed pages are
>> not very useful.  These days, storage is cheap.  How would you feel
>> about having the man pages installed uncompressed in Debian?  That
>> would allow running text tools directly in /usr/share/man/.
> 
> I'm not personally all that bothered either way, but it's a
> distribution-wide policy decision rather than something I'd decide on.
> I suspect there are still some people who would push back against the
> space cost.
> 
>> I've had to do that several times, and lucky me that I have the source
>> code of the Linux man-pages checked out in my computers, but other
>> users don't and they might have trouble finding for example which
>> pages talk about RLIMIT_NOFILE.  The only way I know of is:
> 
> man -Kaw RLIMIT_NOFILE

Hmm, interesting; I didn't know about -K.

> 
> (This looks at the page source rather than the rendered output, so
> sometimes it over-reports if your search term matches a groff macro,
> etc.  But that's true of your approach too.)

Yeah, this should be good for most purposes.  Consider my itch scratched. :)

Cheers,
Alex

-- 
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
GPG key fingerprint: A9348594CE31283A826FBDD8D57633D441E25BB5
OpenPGP_signature (application/pgp-signature, 833 B) - not displayed
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.