From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Jul 21 13:21:04 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 32BBD37B401 for ; Mon, 21 Jul 2003 13:21:04 -0700 (PDT) Received: from out006.verizon.net (out006pub.verizon.net [206.46.170.106]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2FBAC43FAF for ; Mon, 21 Jul 2003 13:21:03 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Received: from mac.com ([141.149.47.46]) by out006.verizon.net (InterMail vM.5.01.05.33 201-253-122-126-133-20030313) with ESMTP id <20030721202102.LVVG16647.out006.verizon.net@mac.com>; Mon, 21 Jul 2003 15:21:02 -0500 Message-ID: <3F1C4B2A.7090107@mac.com> Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 16:20:58 -0400 From: Chuck Swiger Organization: The Courts of Chaos User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: chris-freebsd@randomcamel.net References: <3F19C78A.7030008@mac.com> <20030719233535.GF77396@sunbay.com> <3F19D8D3.1040401@mac.com> <87vftyoy91.fsf@inf.enst.fr> <20030721192952.GE23226@zot.electricrain.com> In-Reply-To: <20030721192952.GE23226@zot.electricrain.com> X-Enigmail-Version: 0.76.1.0 X-Enigmail-Supports: pgp-inline, pgp-mime Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Authentication-Info: Submitted using SMTP AUTH at out006.verizon.net from [141.149.47.46] at Mon, 21 Jul 2003 15:21:02 -0500 cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: A patch to man to handle "man.1"... X-BeenThere: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Production branch of FreeBSD source code List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 20:21:04 -0000 Chris Doherty wrote: [ ... ] > seems pretty simple: > > 1) first check to see if there's a manpage for the literal argument > (e.g. "ld-elf.so.1") > > 2) if that fails, treat the trailing digit as a section > specifier--i.e. look for "ld-elf.so" in section 1. > > 3) if that also fails, report that not only was there a "ld-elf.so.1" in > any section, but there was also no "ld-elf.so" in section 1. > > does that cover all cases? seems like this is a useful syntax to add > on--anything to make man(7) more usable is a good thing IMO. :-) Thanks for the vote in favor of the proposed syntax, as well as for your thoughts about an implementation that would remain backwards compatible. The only difficulty is that I would probably choose to re-write 'man' from scratch rather than try to make non-localized/extensive changes to the existing code. This can be explained simply, even: the function is_section() has side effects and changes some global variable named 'longsec' which relates to the 'shortsec' variable seen in my patch in ways that I don't want to understand further. :-) On the other hand, are there any other implementations of 'man' around? I seem to recall something called 'polaris' which implemented browsable links between manpages (similar to GNU info pages, come to think of it)...? -- -Chuck