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

Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-08T15:43:04Z

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Hi Colin,

On 4/8/23 15:47, Colin Watson wrote:
> 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

Hmm, interesting; I didn't know about -K.

>
> (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.)

Yeah, this should be good for most purposes. Consider my itch scratched. :)

Cheers,
Alex

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