Re: site FAQ - question missing...

--- Nick Moffitt <[email protected]> wrote:
> begin  John Kodis  quotation:

--snip--


> 
> 	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.

Why not write a shell script (or 
perl/tcl/expect/whatever is available on the disk)
and have it echo "Using this function requires a
network connection to the internet."
"are you sure you want to continue [y/n]"
then you can still allow them to do the scripted
man pages, without making them connect if they
didn't mean to. :)  It's doable, and I like the idea
of being able to read man pages with an inet
connection.



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