On Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 07:57:13PM +0100, Michael Kerrisk wrote: > > > > The information is duplicated in several other man pages. > > How is that a problem?
Usually we maintain information in one place and provide pointers to it, to lessen the maintenance cost in avoiding inconsistent and/or contradictory copies. > > Some even refer to environ(7) on the presumption that > > BROWSER would be documented there. > > Which ones? At a glance, sensible-browser and urlview. This is just on one system. > On the distribution I just checked (not Debian), grepping the > man pages produced exactly one other man page that mentions > BROWSER. apt-listchanges(1), bts(1), dhelp(1), dwww(1), fontforge(1), man(1), mensis(1), querybts(1), sensible-browser(1), urlview(1), ... And that doesn't even include the various non-English translations of these man pages, which also must maintain copies of that information. > Any apps that need BROWSER should of course be documenting > its use in their own man pages -- they do not/should not > be relying on environ(7) to be documenting specific > environment variables. environ(7) seems to be the conventional place for documenting specific environment variables. I don't see why BROWSER is an exception. If this is simply an excuse for not having time to add the appropriate documentation, here is a patch. Thanks. -- Ryan Underwood, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
--- /tmp/environ.7 2006-02-06 15:05:28.000000000 -0600 +++ /tmp/environ.7.new 2006-02-06 15:27:06.000000000 -0600 @@ -97,10 +97,32 @@ .TP .BR EDITOR / VISUAL The user's preferred utility to edit text files. -.\" .TP -.\" .B BROWSER -.\" The user's preferred utility to browse URLs. Sequence of colon-separated -.\" browser commands. See http://www.catb.org/~esr/BROWSER/ . +.TP +.B BROWSER +The user's preferred program to browse URLs. Most programs that respect +BROWSER respect the extended version, which is a sequence of colon-separated +browser invocation commands. See http://www.catb.org/~esr/BROWSER/; we here +reproduce the relevant part. +.IP "" 12 +The value of \s-1BROWSER\s0 may consist of a colon-separated series of +browser command parts. These should be tried in order until one +succeeds. Each command part may optionally contain the string \*(L"%s\*(R"; if +it does, the \s-1URL\s0 to be viewed is substituted there. If a command part +does not contain \f(CW%s\fR, the browser is to be launched as if the \s-1URL\s0 had +been supplied as its first argument. The string %% must be substituted +as a single %. +.IP "" 12 +Rationale: We need to be able to specify multiple browser commands so +programs obeying this convention can do the right thing in either X or +console environments, trying X first. Specifying multiple commands may +also be useful for people who share files like .profile across +multiple systems. We need \f(CW%s\fR because some popular browsers have +remote-invocation syntax that requires it. Unless %% reduces to %, it +won't be possible to have a literal \f(CW%s\fR in the string. +.IP "" 12 +For example, on most Linux systems a good thing to do would be: +.IP "" 12 +BROWSER='mozilla \-raise \-remote \*(L"openURL(%s,new\-window)\*(R":links' .PP Further names may be placed in the environment by the \fBexport\fP command and `name=value' in
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