Baslinux mailing list

[Lee Forrest <lforrestster AT gmail.com>]

Welcome back, Sindi,

On Thu, Dec 28, 2006 at 02:43:36AM +0000, sindi keesan wrote:
> 
[delete]
> >>>Comes to 6.4K with man page in man format.  Text might be smaller.
> >
> >I turn all man format (troll/groff) manpages into plain text on
> >my debian by putting them in a dir called "man1" and:
> >
> ># man -M /path/to/dir/above/man1/ program_name | col -b > program_name,
> >then gzip them and put them into /usr/man on BL.
> >
> >I have a sed script somewhere that would do the same job on BL3.
> 
> BL3 does not have man (the package was about 10MB).  Several of us came up 
> with a script involving man2html and lynx to read man pages, but it does 
> poorly on upper ASCII characters.  Can you write a better man replacement?

I like the basic BL approach. Might be able to come up with an
apropos-like (man -k) script that would search the descriptions
of all the manpages for the occurrence of a string specified on
the commandline. This would be very useful.

It would be faster and simpler to create a sort-of database with those
in it, and use it. Which is what apropos/whatis do. Wouldn't be a huge
file.

And that sed script does work for some types (troff/nroff/groff) of
manpages to convert them to plain text. Could make another for the
other common type.

So man could have a -h option that catted a file that read
something like this:

man program_name

man -k string #open descriptions that have the string in them
              # in less

man -c file  # convert man page to plain text and gzip it and put
             # it in /usr/man and delete the manpage

man -u       # update description database (could run at boot from
             # /etc/rc


But hang loose. I've got the mutt from your site working on BL
(thanks again), but haven't tested msmtp or fetchmail or procmail
and straightened out their configuration files, if necessary.

Many thanks to David Moberg for creating the uclibc, statically-linked
executables of msmtp and fetchmail, and the new pppd-2.4.1 dynamically
linked libc5, for me. (And anyone who asks me for them. I don't have
a website right now, but will netcat them over.) 

Got procmail/formail from SW4.0.

Making the shift from debian to BL is my top computer priority at
present.

debian 5923 directories, 434851 files 3.2G

BL 116 directories, 974 files 23M

> >I've installed elvis from SW4.0 (I really need a full-featured editor)
> >and altered the man script like so:
> >
> >gunzip /usr/man/$1.gz &&
> >/usr/bin/elvis /usr/man/$1 &&
> >gzip /usr/man/$1
> 
> Would this also work with the busybox vi (in the version I compiled, 
> 1.1.0)?

I don't see why not.

> >Because I like to to put notes in the man pages, mainly usage examples,
> >enclosing them in [[...]] so they don't get mixed up with the original
> >page.
> >
> >Those "&&" just mean that the command preceding them has to run
> >successfully before the next line is executed.
> >
> >But honestly, I don't see a truly functional BL fitting on less
> >than about a dozen floppies. Which is doable.

"For an hdd installation", I should have added.

> >But how much longer will floppies even be manufactured?
> 
> I keep everything on hard disk.  My 1.44MB floppies are always failing. 
> THe 720s last longer, 360K's almost forever.  We are now using USB memory 
> sticks for most file transfers, or zip drive (parport) if no USB>

Are those not using volatile RAM? If so, how can you trust them?

> >
> >Thanks for the neat apps, Sindi,
> >
> >Get me the templates for the various mails_with_attachments you
> >want to send, and I'll write that script.
> 
> Do I need different templates depending on the file format (jpg zip 
> doc..)?

Not sure. Maybe if those are specified in the boundary markers. Hmmm...
I guess not. No reason the script to couldn't read the filetype and
assign it to a local environment variable.  I don't _think_...

Lee

-- 
BasicLinux: Small is Beautiful
http://www.basiclinux.com.ru