"Re: Does have any article about NetBSD quota" or "to MKHTML or not to MKHTML"

[Ephaeton%gmx.net@localhost]

[[Was on netbsd-users.]]

On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 01:57:23PM +0200, Ignatios Souvatzis wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 12:54:52AM +0800, Ling Xiaoheng wrote:
> > I only can find some information via MAN page.But can't search any
> > article about it.
> 
> For a general description of the system and its original implementation,
> there's Robert Elz' article installed on your NetBSD system.
> 
> If you have a full system installation, you can read it by 
> 
> tbl /usr/share/doc/smm/04.quotas/quotas.ms | nroff -ms | more

*tongue in cheek* Hey why that? With MKHTML turned on we should
have generated and installed HTML Versions of these files, shouldn't
we? I mean, so that we can read them with a program which is in
base NetBSD, just as in the above invocation.

Seriously, can we turn MKHTML off again? I think hubertf's comment
about us not having a HTML reader in base is quite valid. If somebody
wants to serve these html files (which was the "valid" use-case as
concerned to availabilty of programs in base I've seen), shouldn't
they be able to build with MKHTML set to yes (and then that being the
non-default) ?.

I myself use groff to spit out postscript, which I then can happily
print. But that doesn't mean I want to see a postscript, PDF, HTML,
pre-formatted more manpage for every manpage (or ROFF Markup) that
we have. Rather than that, the source and the tools to work with this
source is available. One could equally well (to the use-case of reading
HTML manpages in a browser) argue that PDF is a state-of-the-art format,
too, with the added benefit of it being printer friendly (added to the
inter- and intra-linkability of HTML, which is not printer friendly),
and as such we should by default generate PDF manpages and install these.

Well...

-Martin