Complete Man Pages (was Re: UNIX Documentation)

[Tom Christiansen]

If you have a man program that understands MANPATHs, then you can pretty
easily maintain multiple sets of man pages on the same machine.  Just keep
each set in a separately-named but conveniently-accessible directory.
Then you can get a them with something close to:

    man ls	# standard version
    man -M /usr/man/tahoe ls
    man -M /usr/man/sysVr3.1 ls
    man -M /usr/man/sun ls

I've got my system set up that way, and I find it pretty convenient.
They're not all available in the same print-out, but think that's ok.

Now, I've also got things set so you can tell which tree the man page come
from at a glance (path as displayed by pager, as well as headers that
boldly state which set it's from using per-tree -man [nt]roff macros) and
so you can get at a tree more easily from the command line, such as with
`man tahoe ls', for example.  While not all man programs give you quite
all this fluff :-), as long as you have one that groks a MANPATH, you
should be able to do much of this.


--tom
--
"Hey, did you hear Stallman has replaced /vmunix with /vmunix.el?  Now
 he can finally have the whole O/S built-in to his editor like he
 always wanted!" --me (Tom Christiansen <tchrist at convex.com>)