VMS-HELP on UNIX ?

[Lowell Savage]

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> 	For about 6 months I worked with a VAX/VMS-system (first
> 	version 3.7 later 4.1).
> 
> 	One of the (few) things I really liked about the environment,
> 	was the HELP-system. It is really very user-friendly and it's
> 	easy as privileged to add information to the libraries.
> 
> 	Does anyone have a similar system running on UNIX?
> 
> Bjorn Sjoholm, Computer Science, University of Uppsala, Sweden

Perhaps what might be a little bit more widely desired...has
anyone set up the man system so that several directories can
contain man pages?  I realize that there are 8 sections (and
on some systems more) of man pages.  However, there are
occasionally applications where it would be nice to set up
another directory with a bunch of man pages (all sections) that
are for some specialized application.  Also, as mentioned by
Bjorn, it would be easier for Joe User to add and maintain his
own man pages for his group to use when just that group will be
using the application being documented.  All of this without
needing to go through the already overworked(? (-:) SA and
without fear of wiping out other man pages.  As for formatting
the man pages like the help files in VMS...I'm afraid that
there is already too much overhead invested in the UNIX man
system to manage a reformat.  VMS tends to have many short pages
arranged heirarchically with very few at the top, while UNIX
tends to have a smaller number of long pages arranged laterally.
Changing just the (relatively) small amount of standard UNIX
documentation to work well in the HELP approach would be a large
task in itself, but then comes all the other application program
documentation.  The UNIX man program works quite well with minimal
standardization--the VMS HELP system really needs a very rigorous
release and configuration control system to make it work well.

Please note: By suggesting separate directories for man pages, I
am not advocating that every little file-transfer program, graphics
filter, or text-processing program have it's own little subdirectory
dedicated to it.  What I am thinking of is for a system that has a
large number of tools for some specific application which
more-or-less come in a package.  As an example-the tools in the
University of Washington VLSI Consortium contain with a man program
that searches three directories: /usr/bin/man (the usual), ~cad/man
(man subdirectory in the home directory of the "cad" user), and
$UW_VLSI_MAN/man (man subdirectory of the directory specified in the
$UW_VLSI_MAN environment variable).  But again, it is tied to these
directories.  Since we had the source for this program, I modified
the man program to follow a $MANPATH environment variable (which
looks just like the PATH variable) but I'm wondering if anyone else
has done anything like this?  Or has any better ideas???

				There's more than one way to be savage

				Lowell Savage