- Status Unconfirmed
- Percent Complete
- Task Type Feature Request
- Category Application
- Operating System Release 1 (Zaxxon)
- Severity Low
- Reported Version Hotfix 5
FS#244 - Include man and the manpages
The command line environment of the default OS does not include the command "man" and the respective manpages of the installed programs.
I personally often use manpages, as I hardly remember the syntax/arguments of all programs I use.
Having them would be very convenient!
EVALUATING NEEDED STORAGE AMOUNT
Some may argue that storage space is quite limited on the NAND.
Yes I agree. Hence the number of included programs is limited too. Hence it would not be all too many manpages.
When I press TAB into an empty Terminal prompt, I get 1406 possibilities, which is about the amount of available commands/programs if we ignore aliases, etc.
Multiply that with an average of 20 kb per manpage, and you get about 30 MB in total. With compression this could possibly be brought down to 15-20 MB.
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS
A) Store into the NAND the manpages of core OS CLI programs only, and not all the library/system/etc documentation.
B) Include only the man command into the core OS, and compile/configure it in such a fashion, that it finds the manpages within non-NAND media (SD card, USB volume, etc).
b1) Specify that it simply looks into a certain path within the /media/*/pandora/ structure.
b2) Or offer PND packages like man-core.pnd, man-extended.pnd,... you get the idea or even man-custom.pnd (which would look into its appdata or a certain path for custom added manpages, to somehow get the b1 approach within the PND approach).
Well, we can't get it on the NAND... there's really not enough space.
When updating packages, some temp space is needed as well, so the NAND shouldn't be too full with normal stuff.
The forementioned 15-30 MB being to much?
What about offering this as a pnd, included via the manpath or a small helper script residing within the NAND?