Where is the info viewer?

[Polytropon]

On Wed, 11 Sep 2019 12:00:12 -0400 (EDT), doug at fledge.watson.org wrote:
> 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.

There's probably a much efficienter way, but at least what I did
(zcat | groff | ps2pdf) works.



> I'll bet you can read and modify /etc/termcap :)

Yes, and I've been doing this on FreeBSD 4 and 5, but I canoot
remember for what particular purpose... :-)



> 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. 

Correct - replacements (with a different name) were supplied at
the same time the original bind-related tools were removed, and
so there is no big problem. You can either use the new tools, or
install the bind-based ones if you have scripts that rely on them.



> Here we remove the tool needed to read a set of files from the base 
> but leave the files.

Just that was the situation I found strange.



> I suspect there will be a lot of this when sendmail is 
> removed from the base.

And when base ("the OS") will be broken up into individual packages,
maintained by pkg, which is also a package, and maybe the kernel
also becomes a package... oh wait, why does this sound as if I'm
talking about Linux?! ;-)



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...