Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: 2004.2 Feature Requests

[Brian Friday <bfriday@lasierra.edu>]

Just a lurker point his nose in but here I go

The contents of "/usr/share/doc" can be found when apache is 
installed and the default for the doc directory isn't change 
at the url of "= http://localhost/doc". It works great, your 
web browser is smart enough to uncompress the gzipped 
content so space is saved in a manner which is both elegant 
and productive.

As for switching man pages or info pages to html 
automatically and or by default I've got to ask the obvious 
question of why. The current setup of the doc directory is: 
1) useful with apache, less, zcat, lynx etc; 2) doesn't 
require a serious amount of effort on the part of the ebuild 
maker to put the docs in a location users can get them, 3) 
doesn't require transforming those docs into something other 
than the original makers intended. By keepings points 2 and 
3 intact it means less hoops ebuild makers and maintainers 
have to jump through which for my money translates into 
happier makers/maintainers and more initial ebuilds 
submitted by joe/jane "I want this app" submitter.

Now if your talking "I'm a user who wants to take the 
additional step of using man2html and info2html" well 
perhaps thats different but thats a second step maybe we can 
document for end-users but leave it up to them if they want 
to implement it. If there is a serious feeling of adventure 
maybe making it a use flag or portage option which acts just 
like packages and warns the user that they must run 
"man2html" or "info2html" in order to insure that the 
man/info files they just installed with the application are 
available. Of course like fixpackages a "this could take a 
lot of time and or use additional space" warning would be 
appropriate.

them's my pennies!

John Nilsson wrote:

> What about /usr/share/doc/, /usr/share/man/ and /usr/share/info/?
> 
> app-text/man2html and app-text/info2html seems to be the right tools.
> 
> /usr/share/doc/ would need ebuild support to be converted to html
> though.
> my system has 361 dirs in /usr/share/doc/ of which 68 has a html/
> subdir.

--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list