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From: tchrist@wraeththu.cs.colorado.edu (Tom Christiansen)
Subject: RFP: Updated Version of Perl Man
Message-ID: <CFFKy0.Dy@Colorado.EDU>
Followup-To: comp.lang.perl,comp.unix.admin
Sender: news@Colorado.EDU (USENET News System)
Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1993 02:15:35 GMT
Lines: 78
I'm going to release a new version of the perl suite which I first
published quite a long time ago. It was, at that time, the Answer to All
Man's Problems, or so I believed. However, new problems have arisen since
then, or at least, I've been made aware of them.
I'm looking for things that you might like to see. If you haven't read
the docs for the current program, you should read them before adding
things I already put there. :-) I do need to know weirdnesses that exist
in people's current systems of which I may be unaware. I don't have many
different kinds of systems to test it on.
The resulting program will be freely redistributable.
In no particular order, here are things I'm going to add:
system-wide manconf.pl file so you don't have to munge the source
a table mapping extensions to compress programs to support
arbitrary compression schemes
makewhatis processing of cat pages instead of man pages
support for bizarre directory structures (like SGI)
open dbm files only as needed; use *globs instead of evals for speed.
short circuit for "man 8 something" -- make it faster
support for running setgid man
makewhatis should check for whether a man page is "safe" (no chance
someone else put a trojan horse there)
mv dup code in makewhatis and man into a library file
maybe a configure program?
support for Liam Quin's lqtext system so you can do more
interesting queries (what man pages talk about filesystems
and dumps and inodes?)
support for dbases that don't live where the man pages do
robustness in the face of dbm limitations
per man tree section search path
personal reconfig files
chance to follow see-also's.
support for new bsd mandoc set (although since i'm parsing
catpages, it might not matter)
some aux tools to help sysadmins manage man trees, like
a man expire tool to zap old catpages who still have
manpages around.
I don't really want to support poor folks with inferior file systems who
can't have long names. I may have to. Complain bitterly to your vendor,
and upgrade to a vendor who ships modern filesystems.
Complain also if they aren't shipping man source.
Complain also to anyone who ships documentation in only info format
instead of readable parsable roff that fits in with the existing toolset.
You know who you are.
Some of these things would be easier using Perl v5, but I want to make it
run under Perl v4. If we ever have a usable guiperl, I'll probably
rewrite xman, which is notoriously brain-dead in several fundamental ways.
--tom
--
Tom Christiansen tchrist@cs.colorado.edu
"Will Hack Perl for Fine Food and Fun"
Boulder Colorado 303-444-3212