Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2002 10:20:58 +0200 From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> To: "Gary W. Swearingen" <swear@attbi.com> Cc: "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@hub.org>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: layered file systems ... Message-ID: <20021214082058.GC19785@gothmog.gr> In-Reply-To: <8lel8lk398.l8l@localhost.localdomain> References: <20021213095811.A13175-100000@hub.org> <20021213151455.GD92171@blazingdot.com> <20021213113108.B13175-100000@hub.org> <20021213162521.GA96011@blazingdot.com> <20021213133130.S13175-100000@hub.org> <8lel8lk398.l8l@localhost.localdomain>
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On 2002-12-13 13:39, "Gary W. Swearingen" <swear@attbi.com> wrote:
> "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@hub.org> writes:
> > That's kinda what I'm wondering ... is it just that nobody has updated the
> > man page since '94 ... from looking at the sources, ther have been mods to
> > it since then:
>
> If you're referring to the manpage date which gets displayed with the
> manpage, you can fugidaboudit; according to the "mdoc" manpage, it's the
> "date of authorship", which most read with an implied "original". I
> complained to the doc people that this policy makes FreeBSD stuff look
> unmaintained to casual users (at least). You can guess the response.
I do remember the thread, but a quick search in my ~/mail archive
didn't show anything about it. An old date in a manpage doesn't
necessarily mean that its text is old. The misunderstanding you
described is valid, but the .Dd tag has been used for 'major
revisions' of the manpages since a long time AFAIK. Furthermore,
since the date of last modification is readily available at the source
of the manpage itself, and there are tools to find and review it,
there is no real reason to use the .Dd information for the same
reason.
The `date' field of the manpage is currently different from the `last
modification date' of the source, and merging the two would lose us
some information; namely the date of the last major revision of each
manpage. Both dates are easy to find, using tools that are standard
in the system:
$ man 1 ls | tail -1
FreeBSD 5.0 May 19, 2002 FreeBSD 5.0
$ zcat `man -w 1 ls` | ident
$FreeBSD: src/bin/ls/ls.1,v 1.72 2002/11/25 13:52:57 ru Exp $
"Some users might be confused" is not a good enough reason for merging
the two date fields, since losing information is bad, but answering a
few questions like "are my manpages old?" once in a while is not
really bad :)
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