Author Topic: Manpages? Infopages? (Read 3655 times)

g33k · « **on:** January 07, 2005, 11:52:45 am »

Neither man nor info seems to be available in pdaXrom... is this so? If not, why not? Documentation is way important, particularly for Linux newbies like myself. Everyone tells you to RTFM, yet the FM seems not to be available...

stupkid · « **Reply #1 on:** January 07, 2005, 11:55:01 am »

Man pages and info take up a lot of space. That is why they are not included.

g33k · « **Reply #2 on:** January 07, 2005, 12:00:23 pm »

How much space are we talking about here... I mean, it's essentially plaintext, right?

Is there any relatively simple way to install the man system if one wants it?

iamasmith · « **Reply #3 on:** January 07, 2005, 02:17:01 pm »

Sounds like it could be just the job for squashfs, as long as we had a reasonably static core of apps that we wanted man for.

The problem is that updates on IPK feeds mean that we are going to drift out of date quickly and man pages for grep etc. are not going to refelect the limited options of busybox.

What about starting a collection of man pages for current stuff and we could periodically build a squashfs and/or cramfs if you don't want to use squashfs containing the man pages.

Actually building man is pretty simple. In fact we should be able to build one of the graphical man viewers too

- Andy

g33k · « **Reply #4 on:** January 07, 2005, 03:20:10 pm »

Although a graphical man viewer would be very nice, I'd want to have the command line viewer in any case. More than once I've broken something such that I couldn't get X started and was stuck on the command line, but was able to pull through with the help of manpages.

pgas · « **Reply #5 on:** January 07, 2005, 04:42:07 pm »

iamasmith i like you're idea....just need to find a very very brave guy to do the manpage compilation work...

g33k · « **Reply #6 on:** January 07, 2005, 05:30:23 pm »

My thought would be to use a script that upon addition of a new package to the feed would fetch the appropriate manpage and rebuild the squashfs. That could be hacked together with a bit of Perl, I would think.

iamasmith · « **Reply #7 on:** January 07, 2005, 05:35:07 pm »

I agree, I think the place to start would be to produce man pages just for the current feed and onboard dev stuff.

I guess this cuts it down a bit and we could request submission of man pages somehow sent to the unstable feed for inclusion/automatic build of a second cramfs and squashfs.

I suppose the other way to work is to survey the ipkg.status file and work out the needed pages/versions and produce a bespoke cramfs or squashfs based on those settings..... could even be done on the Z I suppose.

, I think I would end up divorced if I took this on though.

stupkid · « **Reply #8 on:** January 08, 2005, 12:49:19 am »

The compressed man pages on my Debian system (gzip -9) are 18MB. The man pages on pdaxrom are not going to be much smaller. Certainly a system as described by iamasmith is a possibility, but I wouldn't want to implement and maintain it. You have to do a cost to benefit comparison and it is just not there to me. But this is just one man's opinion...

conundrum · « **Reply #9 on:** January 09, 2005, 01:29:36 am »

I find myself also missing the man pages at times, but perhaps a web based one would be our best solution? In other words, make a seperate/add to the current FAQ information about each package. The maintainers/cross-compilers/programmers could be left with the responsibility of their own package.

I know what you will say, "But that's not really man", or "But that isn't on the fly", no it isn't. It is however, the most space conserving (for us, not Laze ), and simplest. If you crash your Z hard enough to be unable to access the web, you'll have to wait. This also leaves the possibility for each user to save the pages they need onto RAM or store it in whatever way they see fit.

News:

Author Topic: Manpages? Infopages? (Read 3655 times)