[petsc-dev] troff man pages

[Barry Smith]

On Apr 22, 2011, at 12:26 PM, Jed Brown wrote:

> 
> 
> 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 Rather than use an outdated tool that uses an outdated display model ("real man pages") can you not find an "our editors" that "could automatically display the formatted" HTML "page when we are typing slowly in the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.

   In other words the older technology is better than the newer technology, not an uncommon occurrence.

   I'm fine with you hooking up traditional man pages, but note that we shove a bunch of stuff into the .html manual page that sowing doesn't directly handle. So likely the traditional man pages would be different.

   Barry

   
> 
> Surely emacs is not so outdated that they  cannot use our html manual pages in this role?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 Emacs may be totally outdated, but it can certainly do this.