Re: [Groff] Mission statement

[Charlie Kester]

On Sun 16 Mar 2014 at 09:40:44 PDT Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> Hi Charlie,
>
> > Since then there have been lots of tweaks to automate as much as
> > possible, but at the heart there is still a need to manually
> > categorize the commands.  I wish manpages would contain something that
> > would help with that.  The existing section numbers are next to
> > useless, since almost everything I'm trying to get a handle on is in
> > section 1.
>
> Have you thought about using your system's package manager to get a
> per-package structure?
>
>    $ dpkg -L ed | grep '/man..*/'
>    /usr/share/man/man1/ed.1.gz
>    /usr/share/man/man1/red.1.gz
>
> Also some put each package in a section, e.g.
>
>    $ dpkg -s ed | grep '^Section:'
>    Section: editors
>
> so if per-package was too fine a granularity you could have
> per-(package-)section instead.

Interesting idea, thanks!

But my main point was to show how a browser can be used to provide some
metastructure and discoverability to what is otherwise a huge grabbag of
atomized content.

A terminal-based alternative might create a set of subdirectories for
the categories and then populate them with hard- or soft-links to the
manpages.  This structure could be browsed with a file manager like mc
or vifm.  So html'ized pages and a web browser aren't strictly
necessary.  Just convenient.

As convenient as the remotely served pages Eric describes.