> > What we need is a group of people - not many, just 10 or so - who are willing
> > to write the man pages for things that obviously _should_ have man pages but
> > don't. Like libc6. Let's ask the Linux man-pages maintainer... [added to Cc:
> > line]... Andries, what's your feeling on the direction of section 3 man
>
> No this is the wrong approach.
>
> The whole point of texinfo is it can generate output in many formats. Teach
> it to output man page format, and perhaps add some extra markup to the
> info system to do man pages nicely. That gets the FSF man support, hopefully
> keeps them happy and avoids mass duplication of work
Ok, but then some effort needs to be expended on making the texinfo
sources of the man pages up to date and consistent. One of the things
that started my involvement in this discussion is irritation that BOTH
"man crypt" and "info crypt" display the same, obsolete man page, dated
September of 1994. "info libc", on the other hand, if searched for
"MD5" or "crypt" and the associated "crypt" link followed, reveals a
totally different behavior for crypt.
So perhaps the right thing to call for is that the information in the
libc texinfo source be propagated into individual documents in such a
way that the associated man pages are correct. As I mentioned in an
offline discussion of this point, I don't much care what the base format
of unix and command reference documentation is: sgml, texinfo, groff --
but I really do hate to encounter bad/erroneous/missing/obsolete man
pages because I rely on the man pages to document all sorts of systems
and library calls in quick'n'dirty programming efforts. Right now,
there are WAY too many man pages that are just broken. Heck, "man man"
references "man.conf(5)" which no longer seems to exist.
rgb
Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:rgb@phy.duke.edu
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