Man

Unix man command

The command line man command is used to display manual files for various other applications and command line tools. man is not currently installed in sugar to save the several mb that all of the man pages include.

man Content Bundle

If the installed commands' man pages were converted to html (plenty on the web) and distributed as a content bundle this would alleviate a lot of the problems of not including man in the sugar repo's.

Recompilation of man

If a man command was included that pointed to the location of the man content bundle installation this would allow a user to view man from the command line without adding additional packages and making the files removable from the sugar UI. The only downside would (possibly) be the residual custom man command if it were not removed with the above content bundle.

A cursory look at man's ./configure script help shows that the places man will look for content are:

• /var/cache/man
• /var/catman
• /usr/man/cat?

It seems that you can't just specify a different location for man pages on the command line.

Enhancement ticket

This feature is suggested in http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6851 so please feel free to discuss implementation (or non-implementation) there.