Re: [Groff] Simplifying groff documentation

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi,

Back on 2006-12-31 Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Ralph Corderoy <address@hidden>:
> > Will /usr/share/man still have roff man pages as well as the HTML
> > conversion?
> 
> Probably.  But is likely that man will at some point start presenting
> through the browser by default if you have a BROWSER variable defined.

Please don't do that.  You introduced the BROWSER project:

    http://www.catb.org/~esr/BROWSER/index.html

    "an effort to promulgate a convention for expressing your browser
    preference to programs which must call browsers to view URLs"

I'm quite happy to have BROWSER specify my preferred URL viewer, but it
has no right to screw up man(1) by suggesting to it that I prefer to
view man pages in a HTML browser.  I don't.  The meaning of BROWSER must
not be subverted.  Commands like urlview(1) are using it and their users
won't stand for it being changed.

Later, on 2007-01-08 in reply to Gunnar Ritter, you wrote:
> 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.

That's like saying that as long as I still see my typing appear at a
shell prompt, the command's standard output can be spoken through the
speaker.  The reflexes don't end on displaying the first bit of the man
page.

> I think I can prove the above statement with a simple thought
> experiment.  Suppose your man(1) were replaced tomorrow with a trivial
> wrapper that formats the manual page to Postscript and pops up an
> instance of gv on the result.  After the first thirty seconds, would
> you care?

Yes, because the UI has greatly changed.  It no longer responds to
less(1) commands that my fingers have learnt to quickly navigate the
text.  I'm stuck with poor keyboard control and the mouse.  You seem to
think that user interaction is one way on hitting Return after "man
bash";  as long as pixels are lit on the screen to display the page,
what does it matter?

Cheers,


Ralph.