[407] in Athena Bugs
/usr/doc files
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert S. French)
Fri May 27 14:09:19 1988
Date: Fri, 27 May 88 14:07:54 EDT
From: "Robert S. French" <rfrench@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
To: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Most of the manuals in /usr/doc (at least the ones that came with BSD)
are completely unusebale by normal users. The Makefiles reference
non-existant programs (like dtbl), and even if they did work they're
on a readonly filesystem. The process I normally have to go through
to print a manual are:
1) Copy all of the files into /tmp
2) Examine the Makefile to figure out which files need to be run
through tbl, eqn, etc.
3) Figure out which macro package needs to be used (some of the
manuals, like gprof, require non-existent macro packages)
4) Pipe everything through the necessary programs and then into
ditroff with the proper macro package.
Normal users cannot be expected to figure all this out. I suggest
that the manual pages be formatted into both PostScript and text
files, and then left there. At least people can print out copies for
themselves then.
Rob
