Date: Sun, 30 Jul 2000 14:47:12 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.osd.bsdi.com> To: Lars Eighner <eighner@io.com> Cc: Ben Smithurst <ben@FreeBSD.ORG>, freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: docs/20298: man 5 keymap missing in 4.1 (Stable) Message-ID: <81112.964993632@localhost> In-Reply-To: Your message of "30 Jul 2000 12:50:41 CDT." <86ya2jh5hq.fsf@dumpster.io.com>
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> BS> Yes, we know. PR 19995. You do realize that the manpage will be > BS> included a lot sooner if you wrote a keymap(5) page? Even if it > BS> wasn't perfect, it would provide a starting point for someone to > BS> clean it up. > > You do realize if I had any idea what the page was supposed to look > like - or how to find that out - I wouldn't be asking. The only > example of a keymap(5) page I can find is for minix, which might as > well be Greek so far as its relevance to FreeBSD is concerned. I think Ben was simply expressing (and suffering from) some of the Usual Frustration(tm) we all feel about a surplus of PRs and a shortage of the kinds of code donations which help close those PRs. While both he and I respect the fact that you cared enough about the problem to submit two different PRs on the subject, I think we also see it from the same perspective: All the available statistical evidence we have on PRs strongly indicates that in a volunteer-driven environment, annoyance or lack of satisfaction with a problem is the biggest driving factor in getting that problem fixed and it's sort of a non-transferable resource. In other words, it's not vindictiveness which drove Ben to throw the PR back in your face but the simple weight of statistical evidence which claims that you're now the most likely person in the entire FreeBSD community to fix the problem. Tag, you're it. :-) > I'm not going through a checklist: "Aha, man page missing, 5 points > off!" I attempted to pull up the page because it seemed to me it Hmmm... A scoring system! Even though I know it's unworkable, I find the idea strangely compelling. :) > might contain particular information (the list of valid values that > can be plugged into the keymap tables) that I needed and that I did > not know how to discover otherwise. I still don't know how to > discover that information otherwise. I think you'd be just as "correct" to submit a series of diffs against the other man pages which remove the dead reference. A man page which hasn't been written, however good the author's intentions, should not be referenced in that author's other man pages and nobody would dispute the fact (where at least checked-in sources are concerned). Another option, if you're feeling especially stubborn (hoo-ah!), would be to go read through the syscons code to figure out what the heck the keymap(5) man page should look like. I think kbdcontrol -d also dumps out a pretty reasonable looking keymap file which you could always document the format of (it's ASCII, how hard can that be? :). Other man pages in /usr/share/man/man5 will serve as reasonable templates for it, so you don't even need to be particularly fluent with mandoc format to pull it off. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the messagehelp
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