[Oberon] reading man pages; was "n-o: timer-reset chit-chat"

[shark at gulfnet.sd64.bc.ca]

Vasile,

v> I still have to guess, how do you read manual pages using Oberon,

Debian and Oberon are on separate machines;
Debian on a Sparc 2 and Oberon on a 486 pc;
both on the net.

.bashrc in Debian contains this definition.
    function mantxt () { man -Tlatin1 $1 | col -bx > $1".man" ; }

To read the page for mgetty, these steps are followed.
1. mantxt mgetty   # In Debian, put the mgetty manpage in file mgetty.man.
2. Using ftp from Oberon, retrieve mgetty.man to the Oberon system.
3. ET.OpenAscii  mgetty.man 
4. ET.StoreChar mgetty.man  # So in the future it can be opened with ET.Open.
5. All the man pages currently in the Oberon system are listed thus. 
  System.Directory  USR:*.man 

A little tedious but still better than reading in Debian 
for my taste.

v>   System.Execute locate .ext (* or maybe find ... *)

You must have Oberon installed in a Linux
system.  I don't have that.  (Can Oberon be 
installed in Debian Linux on a Sparc?)

v>   Still there are two minor nuisances. ... dashes 
from underscores, ... quote Some-File-Name ...

True.  Months ago, Pieter M. mentioned an effort to 
remove the restrictions on file names.  Presumeably
this will be complete in the next full release.

v> Shouldn't the default font for EditTool.OpenUnix/Ascii be Courier?

Courier text is not so pleasant to read as Oberon.
Also, Courier makes man pages a little too wide 
for my screen.  Again, a matter of taste and 
circumstance.

cg> And you're welcome to convince me, that Oberon provides support for
cooperative bug-fixing and refining.

I'd wouldn't make such a claim nor argue against it. 

Regards,  Peter E.

       http://carnot.pathology.ubc.ca/