From: Wu Y. <ad...@sh...> - 2006-03-26 13:14:47
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Keith Marshall wrote: > On Saturday 25 March 2006 1:37 am, Aaron W. LaFramboise wrote: > >>Would it be possible for man to have a setting to select the groff >>output device based on the Win32 system locale? > > > Of course it should be possible; in software, virtually anything is > achievable, where there is a will to implement it :-) > > I'm not sure, however, if it is *desirable*. At present, the selection > is made by an appropriate setting in a configuration file. The user is > free to change this at any time, to suit his/her own preference. If we How many users of `man' have ever changed their configuration file? How should they know they should change which bit in it? Do we really require users to spend their time to `man man'? > attempt to heuristically set it, based on our view of the locale, then we > deny the user the freedom to make the choice; we *impose* a choice with > which he/she may nt be happy, (and to quote Bruno Haible, writing on the > groff list recently, any heuristic algorithm is effectively "broken by > design"). As recently I have been studying the ease-of-use issues (required by my job), I cannot help casting a really doubtful eye at the value of this `freedom'. Who really needs it? People simply need something working, but not study the guts of their tools. I vaguely remember somebody said something to this effect: the abundance of options shows the inability of the software creator to understand its target users.--Sure, this is against the spirit of Unix; but Unix is not meant to be, nor is, easy to use; though as a programmer I appreciate it very much. Oh, did I forget to mention that studies show that experienced developers are significantly different from most other people in that they are much better at systematic thinking, which about 75% of the whole population are not good at (so grannies never learn to fix computer problems on their PCs)? On the technical side, the suggestion Aaron made was really not heuristic. It is purely deterministic and not broken at all. And he did not intend to force it: he said `have a setting', and I would like to add that it should be the default setting. > > IMO, the present implementation is perfectly satisfactory. The configure > script defaults to Latin1, but provides options to allow the user to > select an alternative. This controls the *initial* configuration, which > is written to the man.conf file. If the user finds that an alternative > choice may be better, it is a simple matter to edit man.conf, and to > experiment until a more suitable alternative is identified. Who needs `man' most? I would suppose the new users. Do you expect them to build their tools (egg or chicken first)? How many people have the default console code page set to 850? Do you think it is good to make a choice that does not work out of the box for most users, most of whom lack the ability/interest to fix a tool they simply want to use to view some documentation? I would make the opposite choice as yours: make ASCII (the safer one) as default. People that have higher needs (like you) generally are able to fix the problem themselves. Sorry that I am more and more thinking like a commercial software vendor. Best regards, Yongwei |