[rescue] xman on IRIX

[Sheldon T. Hall]

"Jonathan C. Patschke" <jp at celestrion.net> wrote ...
To: "Sun Rescue" <rescue at sunhelp.org>

> On Sat, 12 Oct 2002, Sheldon T. Hall wrote:
>
> > Lame as it is, I rather like xman ... but it won't read some man pages.
It
> > complains that it can't find the programs "tbl" or "neqn" and, as it
turns
> > out, neither can I.
> >
> > Can someone tell me what package I'm missing?
>
> You're missing the "Documentor's Workbench" unbundled package.  IRIX
> does not ship with a working [nt]roff.  You want to install groff and
> put this in /etc/profile:
>
>   MANFMTCMD="/path/to/groff -man -Tascii"
>   export MANFMTCMD
>
> As much as I almost never suggest using GNU software over the SGI
> equivalent, groff works as advertised, and the SGI software is
> unobtanium.

That worked fine, but I discovered something else.

The man pages that get installed with the packages from freeware.sgi.com are
in gzip format, with an extension of ".Z".  xman wants them in packed
format, with an extension of ".z".

So ... I could have just un-gzipped the files and packed them, and they
would have worked, too.

Now, why SGI's own freeware site sends out man pages that are incompatible
with the default installation of IRIX, I can't say.  They could just as
easily send out packed files and avoid the whole problem.

Thanks again.

-Shel