Subject: why are we renaming ncurses man pages?

From: Michael Alan Dorman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 06 Jun 1996 14:19:48 -0400

The latest ncurses snapshot broke the manpage renaming while trying to
automate the decision of whether renaming needs to take place.  So I
complained.

Now I find myself in the silly position of having requested that
people fix a feature that, upon reflection, I cannot make any argument
for because I don't know exactly why it's being done myself.

So, could someone explain why it is necessary for us to rename all the
ncurses manual pages?  Is it simply an aesthetic thing, or is it a
technical issue relating to our choice of man program?

Cheers,

Mike.
--
"Don't let me make you unhappy by failing to be contrary enough...."

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From: [email-masked] (David Engel)
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 13:58:44 -0500 (CDT)

> technical issue relating to our choice of man program?

Which renaming?  If you mean adding 'ncurses' to the end of every
filename, as in clear.3ncurses, I'll take a stab at it.

One reason is to not conflict with other man pages which may have the
same basename.  For example, in my /usr/man/man3 directory, I have an
exit.3 from libc and an exit.3tcl from Tcl.

A second reason is so you can easily identify all of the man pages
that come from a particular package.  Using Tcl for example again, I
can do an ls *.3tcl in /usr/man/man3 and see all of the Tcl man pages.

David
-- 
David Engel                        Optical Data Systems, Inc.
[email-masked]                      1101 E. Arapaho Road
(214) 234-6400                     Richardson, TX  75081

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From: Michael Alan Dorman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 06 Jun 1996 15:25:39 -0400

>filename, as in clear.3ncurses, I'll take a stab at it.

Well, you see, we're doing more than that.  We're going from
curs_clear.3x, which should already be pretty unique, to
clear.3ncurses.

This has the added disadvantage that in addition to renaming files,
one now has to hack the innards of the files to make the
cross-references work.

Mike.

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From: Richard Kettlewell <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 8 Jun 96 11:49:24 +0100 (BST)

>curs_clear.3x, which should already be pretty unique, to

Isn't it a good thing that you can say man <function name> and get the
right man page, rather than having to say man curs_<function name>,
though?

- Richard

-- 
http://www.elmail.co.uk/staff/richard/
GCS d- s+:- a-- C++ ULVS+++$ P+++ L++ E++ W(++,--) N(++,+) o? K w---
O? M- V? PS(+,+++) PE Y+ PGP+ t- 5++ X+@ R tv--- b++>++++ DI+ D+ G e++
h r% y++

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From: Michael Alan Dorman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 09 Jun 1996 16:16:24 -0400

>right man page, rather than having to say man curs_<function name>,

Well, yes, I would tend to think it is.  I wish it didn't involve
hacking all the man files as well.

I guess what I'm really asking is why are we doing it when no one else
is.  Is everyone else able to just type `man function name`, or are we
just the only ones that decided this was all too much typing?  Is this
a deficiency in man_db, or, to put it in a more positive light, is
this a tradeoff we make in return for the efficiency of man using db
files?

Mike.

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From: Ian Jackson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 96 02:31 BST

Richard Kettlewell writes ("Re: why are we renaming ncurses man pages? "):
...
> right man page, rather than having to say man curs_<function name>,

Indeed, that's why this is done.  It's also done because curs_func(3x)
is (a) ugly and (b) completely out of keeping with our nice clean
manpage scheme.

ncurses can't do it this way in the upstream version because they have
to support people whose manual programs aren't as good as ours.

Is it really too hard to sed the manpages ?

Ian.

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From: [email-masked] (Erick Branderhorst)
Date: Tue, 11 Jun 1996 15:16:55 +0100

> Is it really too hard to sed the manpages ?
Shouldn't be too difficult but what about non ncurses packages refering
to ncurses manpages. They should change as well. 

Some kind of link between old name (or regular name) man pages and their
renamed name should be provided, run on them during creation of the package
with the manpages refering to for example ncurses manpages.

How many of those do we have, this will probably not be a ncurses only
thing.

Erick

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From: [email-masked] (David Engel)
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 1996 15:34:32 -0500 (CDT)

Sorry for the slow response time.  I've been extremely busy this week.

> Is it really too hard to sed the manpages ?

I checked a couple of other systems.  SunOS lumps almost everthing into
a single curses.3 manpage and Solaris uses the curs_*.3 style.

My suggestion is to install the ncurses manpages unchanged and add
links (either hard or symbolic) for the names we prefer.

David

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From: "Brian C. White" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 1996 17:32:08 -0400

> a single curses.3 manpage and Solaris uses the curs_*.3 style.

While I like to keep things as consistant as possible, I absolutely
can't stand to keep things the same simply because "it's always been
done this way".

Since there is no consistant standard, let's do it right.  The new
way (i.e. "man 3curs <func>") sounds perfect to me!

                                        Brian
                               ( [email-masked] )

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In theory, theory and practice are the same.  In practice, they're not.

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From: Guy Maor <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 1996 16:42:59 -0500 (CDT)

> a single curses.3 manpage and Solaris uses the curs_*.3 style.

Why should we emulate broken systems?

Guy