How does man know?

[Bruce Barnett]

In article <11194 at smoke.BRL.MIL>, gwyn at smoke (Doug Gywn) writes:
>>In fact, Doug, I haven't noticed any inconvenience in man automatically
>>calling PAGER if the output device is a tty.
>
>I certainly have.

Why is it an inconvenence to set your PAGER environment variable?
It just takes a few seconds. Or alias 'man' to man -'?

Sure it's nice to have a system that does automatic paging.
Sure it's nice to have a windowing system for every user of every Unix system.
But there are a lot of users learning Unix without that advantage.

>
>>IMHO the BSD solution was right. It favors the beginner and lets
>>the advanced user work around the default behavior.
>
>I think it is counterproductive to try to target novices and
>programming professionals in the same user interface.

Professional know how to read the manuals.
Novices haven't done that yet.


Doug, I usually understand (and respect) your opinions.
But I really don't understand why you think the default behavior
of man should be optimized for your particular case.

You of all people certainly know how to change the default behavior.

>But then I normally have pagination, scrolling,
>etc. handled by my terminal where it belongs instead of requiring
>every outputting utility to have it built in.

>UNIX's
>shell environment was designed for the latter, and requires
>adherence to the toolkit design philosophy for best effect.
>Interfaces for naive users should be considerably different
>from the normal UNIX shell command environment!


Well, I really meant the first time user of the normal UNIX shell environment.

And I am only talking about the behaviour of ONE program.

Sure there should be a better help system on line, one that will work with
any user interface, including yours, Doug.

Maybe the terminal driver for all terminals should have a built-in pager.
Every unix system I have used does not have this feature. If every
UNIX system had this, I might have a different opinion.

But neither exists. The closest thing is man(1).

Let's look at the bottom line -

How can the beginner learn to change the default environment
when they CANNOT READ the manual pages?

You certainly don't expect someone just learning shell to
write a shell script just so they can read the manuals?

Of course they can use Control-S/Control-Q, if they know about it.
But that isn't the point. (Also - some people have slow reflexes
and can't manage Control-S at 19K baud).

I believe that man(1) on V7, Sys III, and Sys V was poorly implemented.
The BSD changes were an improvement. Sure it's not perfect, but
it certainly make like easier on all those people using it.

Does ANYONE else feel the way Doug does? Perhaps they will do a better job
of enlightening me. :-)

--
Bruce G. Barnett	<barnett at crd.ge.com>   uunet!crdgw1!barnett