[techtalk] man, more or less? :)

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Tue, Jan 11, 2000 at 09:25:01PM +0000 or thereabouts, Karl-Heinz Zimmer wrote:
> > I re-read man man (ahem) and spotted references to
> > /etc/man.config.
> 
> Thanks for telling me!
> 
> I am not able to find this config file nor did I find
> a way (at least not in  man man) how to specify it.

It looks like there's two very different versions of this. 

I got curious and unpacked the src.rpm, which is probably what
I should have done in the first place. There is an LSM file in
it; the relevant bits are
Title:		man, man2html, hman
Version:	1.5g
Entered-date:	1999-04-06
[desc snipped, but I like the look of this 'hman' for using your
favourite browser to browse man pages; time to build it, I think!]
Authors: 	John Eaton, Richard Verhoeven, Michael Hamilton,
		Andries Brouwer
Maintained-by:	aeb at cwi.nl (Andries E. Brouwer)
Primary-site:	ftp.win.tue.nl /pub/linux-local/utils/man
		172k man-1.5g.tar.gz
		 994 man-1.5g.lsm
Alternate-site: metalab.unc.edu /pub/Linux/apps/doctools/man

The README says which of those authors are still involved, and
adds

	There is a very different man program, also derived from
	John Eaton's original version (by Graeme W. Wilford)
	distributed under the name man_db, with version numbers
	like man_db-2.3.10.  Do not confuse the two, they are
	mutually incompatible, although they perform nearly the same job.

I think that clears it up! Red Hat ships one; Debian (I think you
said?) ships the other. :)

Telsa


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