[petsc-dev] troff man pages

[Barry Smith]

On Apr 22, 2011, at 11:42 AM, Jed Brown wrote:

> MPICH2 uses the same documentation software and has real man pages, why doesn't PETSc?

   We originally did "real man pages", then did both, I think, for a while and then decided to just use the "modern" approach of html.  I think it was a little bit of a pain in the butt to have both plus the disk space was a bigger deal back then.
> 
> Part of why I ask is that our editors could automatically display the formatted man page when we are typing slowly in the body of a function call. I typically split my screen and jump to the definition when I'm unsure of things, but an automatically displayed man page would be better in some ways.

   Rather than use an outdated tool that uses an outdated display model ("real man pages") can you not find an "our editors" that "could automatically display the formatted" HTML "page when we are typing slowly in the body of a function". Surely emacs is not so outdated that they  cannot use our html manual pages in this role?  I say this partially in jest, but only partially.


   Barry