At 02:56 PM 9/14/98 -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>
>We have a "catman" in the tree that has never been activated, largely
>because it doesn't actually understand /etc/man.conf and has a few
>other flaws. It would be really cool, however, if it actually worked
>right. Among other things, one could then try to build all the pages
>with troff and see how a printed NetBSD manual looks. :)
>
>Anyone out there have too much time on their hands and a desire to fix 
>this?

Yeah, sorta. 

I've been working on this off and on for a few months (my summer was ...
ugly). I got pretty far along.

What I have now is all of the config file parsing split out of man into
their own files. I've got catman using those functions, so the parsing is
exactly the same as man.

The current problem (thanks for bringing this up) is that the man.conf
doesn't have any way of specifying _where_ cat'd files should go. 

There isn't really a way to pair up an unformatted directory with a
formatted directory. What's a good way of doing this?

We could add a directive for specifying paths like "../cat1", but we would
need a way to tie this to specific sets of directories. Perhaps:

_fmtdir /usr/{share,X11R6,blahblah}/man/man1 ../cat1

Plus, a list of directories acquired from _fmtdir directives could be the
list of directories catman searches (along with those from _default). 

Opinions? Suggestions?
--
Kevin P. Neal                          http://www.pobox.com/~kpn/

'You know, I think I can hear the machine screaming from here... \
"help me! hellpp meeeee!"' - Heather Flanagan, 14:52:23 Wed Jun 10 1998