groff alternative?

Diomidis Spinellis dds at aueb.gr
Tue Apr 26 11:43:53 PDT 2005


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.

-- 
Diomidis - dds@ - http://www.spinellis.gr


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