in reply to Re^3: Request for an update to: What shortcuts can I use for linking to other information?
in thread Request for an update to: What shortcuts can I use for linking to other information?

I agree, IMHO the existing functionality should be better documented. Perhaps the logic of what [man://foo] does could be addressed.

  • Comment on Re^4: Request for an update to: What shortcuts can I use for linking to other information?
  • Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^5: Request for an update to: What shortcuts can I use for linking to other information?
by jdporter (Paladin) on Dec 06, 2013 at 15:15 UTC

    As someone who stands ready and willing to make the suggested corrections, I have to tell you both that I have not been able to glean what is wanted, from this thread. Please, one of you, write up a very concise statement of the fix(es) wanted.

    I am not inclined to go reading all of the references you've given, even the other thread(s?) here on PerlMonks, in order to make sense of what you're talking about.

    And taint, I strongly encourage you to finish your research and thoughts before posting. Writing things like "just a sec, I'll check...better, I'll list them..never mind" doesn't help anyone, including you. Remember that these posts will be here for years. If your post is barely comprehensible now, it will be entirely incomprehensible in 5 years. Thanks.

    I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16,000 zombies.
[reply]

      This was indeed a struggle. taint discovered that using [man://cmdname] did not do the same thing as typing man cmdname on their freeBSD box, which surprised them. They had not noticed that the [man://] links generate a url with &manpath=SuSE+Linux/i386+11.3, specifying the OS/distro man pages to display results for. In What shortcuts can I use for linking to other information? it states "Unix man pages:".

      For the sake of reducing any ambiguity I think that the text associated with this section should state that the lookup will check for a particular OS/distro, and name it explicitly. A more complicated change would be to alter how [man://] links work so that users could specify which OS/distro was linked to, however since this could be achieved using the current method for linking e.g. [http://foo.com?bar=baz|man baz], this is overkill IMHO.

[reply]
[d/l]
[select]

        Thank you.

        As it turns out, the [man://] shortcut already had the capability to link to FreeBSD pages instead of SuSE Linux, optionally. It also lets you specify which section of the man you want (e.g. time(3) rather than time(1)). You can even specify which version of the man you want, if you don't want the default (which currently is 11.2 for SuSE, 8.0 9.2 for FreeBSD).

        I have updated the doco.

        That said, I think it would be good to let one specify one of the other available man page sets. I see OpenBSD, CentOS, Darwin, NetBSD, HP-UX, RedHat, SunOS, and various other oddities.

        And then the bigger question, really, is: which of these should be the default? I seem to recall choosing to make SuSE the default since it was far more complete than FreeBSD. Probably still is.

        see 720039

        I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16,000 zombies.
[reply]
[d/l]

In Section Perl Monks Discussion