Re: [Groff] Splitting groff(7)

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi,

Responding to various posts...

> True. But big manpages are more than a little unwieldy online. The
> groff(7) manpage is about as big as a manpage can be and still be
> useful on a terminal. The bash(1) manpage is far worse.

I'm happy with the current size of troff(1) and groff(7).  less will
let me search through the man page;  I don't really notice its size.

> The TCL manpage collection goes beyond Perl's; each function call has
> a manpage. In a way, that's more workable than Perl's approach since
> you don't have to find the manpage that contains the information
> you're looking for (plus anything related). The problem is, for TCL
> and Tk, the total comes to about 500 manpages!

The real problem is man pages exist in a single name-space, ignoring
sections, and Tcl's man page names clash with other things, e.g. time,
pack, open.  I've always thought its man page structure was a very poor
aspect of Tcl.  Some installations place all Tcl pages into their own
section, e.g. `n', which shows what a problem it is;  library routines
should arguably be in section 3 or described in tcl(1).

> I run man and search for a keyword.  I can't easily do any of this if
> the information is spread over many separate man pages.  For example,
> I can *never* find anything in the perl man pages--I always end up
> turning to the camel book.

I have the same problem and run less on man1/perl*.1 and search with
/*foo to find out the likely man pages.  Having learnt perl from
perl(1) before the split I wouldn't like groff to go the same way.


Ralph.