[petsc-dev] troff man pages

[Jed Brown]

On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 18:53, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> Rather than use an outdated tool that uses an outdated display model ("real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".


Yes, we can do this too, but it involves another user configuration variable
for where to find the relevant pages where as man pages already have an
established index. Also, man pages are somewhat more structured so it's
easier to display only the most relevant parts. And man pages work across
different libraries instead of needing to look in a different index when
typing slow within the body of calls to each of PETSc, MPI, Lapack, pthread,
etc.

Surely emacs is not so outdated that they  cannot use our html manual pages
> in this role?


Emacs may be totally outdated, but it can certainly do this.
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