Re: Accessibility of man pages (was: Playground pager lsp(1))

Colin Watson
2023-04-08T13:48:06Z

On Sat, Apr 08, 2023 at 03:02:59PM +0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> Colin, I've had a feeling for a long time that compressed pages are
> not very useful. These days, storage is cheap. How would you feel
> about having the man pages installed uncompressed in Debian? That
> would allow running text tools directly in /usr/share/man/.

I'm not personally all that bothered either way, but it's a
distribution-wide policy decision rather than something I'd decide on.
I suspect there are still some people who would push back against the
space cost.

> I've had to do that several times, and lucky me that I have the source
> code of the Linux man-pages checked out in my computers, but other
> users don't and they might have trouble finding for example which
> pages talk about RLIMIT_NOFILE. The only way I know of is:

man -Kaw RLIMIT_NOFILE

(This looks at the page source rather than the rendered output, so
sometimes it over-reports if your search term matches a groff macro,
etc. But that's true of your approach too.)

--
Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwatson@debian.org]