Where is the info viewer?

[doug at fledge.watson.org]

On Wed, 11 Sep 2019, Polytropon wrote:

> On Wed, 11 Sep 2019 09:52:44 -0400, Lowell Gilbert wrote:
>> Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> writes:
>>
>>> On a fresh install of FreeBSD 12.0 amd64, I installed something via pkg,
>>> and then used "man <something>", which complained that I need to install
>>> groff. I did that - and the manpage could be read. I'm just mentioning
>>> this because I've never seen this before...
>>
>> Historically, man(1) was essentially "nroff -man" under the covers.
>
> Older FreeBSD versions came with /usr/bin/groff - similar problem
> as with info, except that _some_ manpages were available without
> installing 3rd party software (probably already processed and
> rendered, and in that form part of the default installation).
>
> I've also been using groff to turn man entries into PDF files. :-)

Now that's clever. I'll bet you can read and modify /etc/termcap :)

>From another email in this thread:

> It's like how tools like dig and bind disappeared from the base system. They 
> are now in ports and can be installed optionally. However, if a documentation 
> file is still part of the OS, and installed along with the tools comprising 
> the OS, the corresponding reader (!) should also be part of the OS. Or at 
> least a placeholder, which could be a script that simply echo "This tool is no 
> longer part of FreeBSD, please install this or that.", exit 0. :-)


My thought on texinfo was that this was a bit different than when nslookup, dig, 
and bind were removed from the base. To the level I use drill it has the same 
syntax as dig, nslookup functions can [mostly??] be done with host. Bind is, 
well, bind. Here we remove the tool needed to read a set of files from the base 
but leave the files. I suspect there will be a lot of this when sendmail is 
removed from the base.