[12970] in Athena Bugs
Re: decmips 7.7G: /usr/athena/bin/man
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (cfields@MIT.EDU)
Thu Dec 1 16:03:06 1994
From: cfields@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 16:02:26 +0500
To: jhawk@MIT.EDU
Cc: bugs@MIT.EDU
Thanks for your bug report:
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> 1] Per athena_path from /usr/athena/lib/init/cshrc, the appropriate
> (default) man program to use is /usr/athena/bin/man. There is
> no corresponding /usr/athena/man/*/man.?. This is a bug.
Yup. Already scheduled to be fixed in January.
> 2] Under most variants of man, you can change the pager used by
> setting the PAGER environment variable. In my opinion, any version
> of man that does not support this has a bug.
I believe all versions of man on the DECstation predate the PAGER
concept. As such, I don't consider the software to be buggy so much as
outdated.
> In particular, since the Solaris man (/usr/ucb/man) supports this, all
> other Athena platforms should, as well.
There is no /usr/ucb/man on Solaris; however, there is a /usr/bin/man.
That one platform does something in its operating-system software does
*not* mean that it should be supported elsewhere. We are not in the
business of equalizing operating system software.
> The existance of this bug, along
> with other Ultrix oddities, is presumably the reason for
> /usr/athena/bin/man's existance in the first place; having it fail to
> correct this is a bug.
Yes, I believe man is there to provide support for MANPATH, necessary
for our environment to function correctly on that platform.
That it fails to provide PAGER support is a lack of a feature, not a bug.
> 3] I attempted to find the source to /usr/athena/bin/man; I observed
> that I could not access:
>
> /afs/dev/source/src/decmips. This seems odd given that
> system:anyuser can access /afs/dev/source/src/{rsaix,sun4}.
There is fascist source code in the decmips directory. Hence you can't
read it. If there is any fascist code in {rsaix,sun4} that you can
read, it is a bug yet to be corrected in the new source tree.
> I also observed that there was no /afs/dev/source/src/usr/athena/bin.
> FILES.look provides the following man.c's:
.
.
.
> Since the last 3 are unlikely and the second is unavailable
It is in fact in the second.
> Alas, src/bsd-4.3 is inaccessible as well.
As there is fascist code there as well.
> To reinforce the point, however: normal Athena users should have
> access to MIT-written sources wherever possible .
BSD man is not MIT-written source. We do provide access where legal
and practical, and where it has not been overlooked. We do not
gratuitously prevent source access. I do not personally know the legal
status of that version of man, though it may be the case that later
versions (which do support PAGER) are freely redistributable.
Be all that as it may, adding PAGER functionality is a reasonable
request. Since we must provide a different version of man for the
DECstation anyway, that we bring it a bit more up-to-date with the BSD
man code it is based on sounds like a good idea.
Craig Fields
I/S DCNS Development
cfields@mit.edu
