Re: [Groff] Status of the portability work, and plans for the future

[Jon Snader]

On Mon, Jan 08, 2007 at 10:02:11PM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> 
> Gunnar, Linux man(1) can do this *now*.  I added the code myself over a
> year ago.  All that's needed is for HTML pages to be in the right
> places under /usr/man and it's game over.  Of course, if you were 
> insistent on a crappy presentation, you could always set BROWSER=lynx 
> and get behavior almost as primitive as man(1).  Sorry about the
> working hyperlinks.

[...]

> 
> But the preference for man(1) is not, in fact, a preference for
> reading nroffed output on an xterm -- it's a preference for a
> *retrieval protocol*, a set of reflexes about how to *find* stuff.
> The display channel is nearly irrelevant to that preference.
> 

Let me start by saying that I think that the project we are
discussing is great and that we all owe ESR a debt of gratitude
for all the work he has done and will do.  I agree with Eric that
most, or at least many, users would probably prefer HTML rendered
man pages.  I do not think it's correct, however, to conclude
that only Unix troglodytes stuck in the eighties would prefer to
read man pages in an xterm or similar window.

As a Vim user, I use the K command to pop up a man page in an
editor window when I need to check the exact usage or parameters.
I know that emacs users can do similar things with the M-x man
command.  Most serious developers use either emacs or Vim, so I'd
be willing to bet that they prefer to read most of their man
pages this way.  To be sure, these commands could just as easily
bring up the man page in a browser, but this exacts a serious
penalty for *most* users.

As a long-time reader of ESR, I know that he prefers to have a
*single* window on his desktop with an emacs window and
(presumably) a browser side by side.  With this arrangement,
having the man page render in the browser exacts no extra cost
and has all the benefits that we've been discussing.  Most of us,
though, have several windows on our desktops.  For example, I
have a window dedicated to my browser, which takes up the whole
desktop.  If I'm editing and want to pop up a man page in the
browser, I would have to change windows, a serious interruption
of focus (so to speak).  One could argue, I suppose, that this
just shows that ESR is correct and we should stick to a single
window, but there's a whole bunch of us who disagree.

At the end of the day, there's no reason we can't have both
worlds.  In those situations where it makes sense to render the
man page in a browser the system does so.  In those cases where
it's most convenient to pop it up in an editor window or other
viewer, it can do that.  The important thing is that the behavior
be configurable for each user, and that we don't dismiss a desire
for the current behavior as indicative of arrested development.

jcs