[portmaster] navigation in the man page

Anonymous swell.k at gmail.com
Mon Aug 16 22:36:29 UTC 2010


Am I the only one who finds it hard to navigate in portmaster(8)?

- options are neither sorted alphabetically nor grouped in blocks[1]
- too little space between an option and its description
- inconsistent in using terms (flags vs. options)
- being too verbose about port-related terms[2]
- SYNOPSYS makes a spaghetti with one-letter options, long options and comments[3]
- DESCRIPTION is too verbose, it should go either to EXAMPLES or to a
  specific option description[4] in OPTIONS
- `-i' option is misleading, portmaster is already quite interactive

On the side, I still can't find how to shut up portmaster from asking me
about +IGNOREME ports.

[1] look at how grouping is done in grep(1) from textproc/gnugrep

[2] Like the one below

       [-R] -r name/glob of port directory in /var/db/pkg

    Why not use `origin' or `pkg-name' term from pkg_info(1)? WTF is
    `port directory in /var/db/pkg' ? Only *package* directories lie
    there.

[3] Smth like `portmaster [options] [args...]' is probably enough.
    There is already EXAMPLES section, no need to duplicate it.

[4] I for one read DESCRIPTION only once, when first run the tool and
    never again. Most of the time I'm more concerned how certain
    option changes behavior and not interested in general prose.


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