Re: groff alternative?

Am Dienstag, 26. April 2005 20:43 schrieb Diomidis Spinellis:
> Emanuel Strobl wrote:
> > I'm using NO_CXX in my make.conf to strip down the base system to ~50MB
> > including man pages. The only problem is that groff is missing if I don't
> > build c++, and even if I build groff itself and the needed libstdc++ it
> > costs me about 10MB. If I just skip NO_CXX it's only 500k more, so I
> > moved my patches to /dev/null.
> > Does anybody know any alternative for the groff part to view man pages
> > simply with the man command? It's horrible that the filter needs more
> > space than all the manpages itself!
>
> Have you considered preformatting the manual pages on the development
> system, and copying over the pages into /usr/share/man/cat* of the
> shrinked-down system?
>
> > And of course, even if I decide to leave system man pages outside the
> > flash card I still may want to read man pages of installed packages
> > (which is another mountpoint on my installation, so there may be no space
> > limit, depending on the card and additional drives)
>
> Again, it appears your shrinked-down system has access to a more
> powerful machine.  You could modify man to run groff on the remote machine.

That's a possible solution, but not the way I like it. If I once installed one 
of these embedded boxes and decide to add a small package it should be 
possible to read the package's man page without any help of other machines. 
Also ordinary package-installation should work, so preformatting system man 
pages is a good idea but not applicable for the ports/packages.

Thanks,

-Harry