Re: site FAQ - question missing...

begin  John Kodis  quotation:
> On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 02:30:40PM -0700, Nick Moffitt wrote:
> > The vast majority of the IRC channel traffic is people asking
> > "Hey, could you put <program> on the BBC?  Then it would really
> > ROCK!", to which we usually say something like "It's had that
> > since 1.5!"
> 
> One way to at least partially ameliorate this situation would be to
> include the man pages for programs.  Then the users would have the
> option of running "apropos <program-keyword>" instead of asking for
> <program> on IRC.
> 
> While I understand that the man pages take up space and that space
> is tight on the BBC, I'd rather have man pages than some of the
> less-used utilities that are currently included.

	We actually just had a revelation on the IRC channel, which is
that we could write a shell script to grab from a remote repository of
man pages.  

	"man foo" would do a pipeline such as "lynx -dump
http://man.lnx-bbc.org/man1/foo | groff -t -man | less", and "apropos
foo " or "man -k foo" would do something like "lynx -dump
http://man.lnx-bbc.org/manpages.index | grep foo".

	The drawbacks are that it would require a network connection
to read man pages, and it may trick some people into opening outbound
network connections they didn't intend to.  The upside is that it
would be pretty transparent, and behave like a normal man page
collection.

-- 

end
 
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