[MPlayer-dev-eng] [PATCH] Default CDROM device on OpenBSD

[Nicolas George]

Le sextidi 16 thermidor, an CCXVIII, Rowan James a écrit :
> I'm just going to throw this out there... why include sections the user
> can't use in their installed man page at all?
> 
> Would it perhaps be better to just replace it with a stub indicating that
> they're missing a major feature, and a summary of the feature in question?

MPlayer's man page is huge, one rarely read it from start to end. It is much
more common to use text search on a keyword to find the needed feature.

If I find the feature I need is provided by libfoo, but that support for
libfoo was disabled at build time, well, sudu apt-get install libfoo-dev,
./configure --enable-libfoo, and I have what I need.

If the documentation for libfoo had been replaced by a stub, maybe I would
not have found the keyword.


While I am at it, another wild idea about man page: the man page for zsh is
huge, thrice as huge as the one for mplayer. But it is split into small,
manageable parts: man zshbuiltins for builtin functions, man zshzle for the
line editing system, etc., plus man zshall for all the man pages
concatenated, allowing a full-text search. It uses the ".so" feature of
*roff: zshall.1 is very small, and ends with a sequence of ".so
man1/zshoptions.1", ".so man1/zshbuiltins.1".

I would find a similar split very useful for mplayer: someone who just wants
a reminder of the arguments of -ao alsa could type "man mplayer-ao-alsa"
instead of searching for "alsa" in the whole manpage (the relevant
occurrence is the seventeenth). Someone looking for something in the video
filters would type "man mplayer-vf", there would be no risk that his
full-text search brings him in the description of a VO.

Well, that is just an idea in the wind, I do not intend to actually work on
it anytime soon. But if anyone is bored during the summer vacations...

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George
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