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Date:      Thu, 20 May 1999 19:53:41 +1000
From:      Greg Black <gjb@acm.org>
To:        Nik Clayton <nik@nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk>
Cc:        doc@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-translate@ngo.org.uk
Subject:   Re: FDP Directory Reorganisation 
Message-ID:  <19990520095342.18541.qmail@alice.gba.oz.au>
In-Reply-To: <19990519214022.D60921@catkin.nothing-going-on.org>  of Wed, 19 May 1999 21:40:22 %2B0100
References:  <19990513211458.B70767@catkin.nothing-going-on.org>  <19990519214022.D60921@catkin.nothing-going-on.org> 

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> The main change is replacing lang/encoding with lang.encoding, based on
> the contents of /usr/share/locale.  The articles/books/man split is 
> still there, and will remain unless someone can come up with something
> better.

I'm really disappointed to see books and articles still there,
especially since all the feedback that I saw was in favour of
eliminating the arbitrary distinction.

>    Why bother with the distinction between books and articles?
>    
>    We need something to distinguish between manual pages and everything
>    else. Otherwise we would have this directory filled with one directory
>    for piece of documentation, and then one more directory which would
>    contain all the manual pages. This is not an appealing idea.
>    
>    So we need at least one directory to lump all the non-manual pages in
>    to. Finding a useful name for this one directory is hard. tutorials is
>    wrong, as many of them are not tutorials. docs is too non-specific
>    (after all, the manual pages are ``docs'' as well).
[...]
>    I am prepared to replace this with just one directory if someone can
>    come up with a good name for it.

Just because it's a bit difficult to dream up the best name for
this directory is a poor reason to impose an arbitrary division
of similar documents based purely in their length.

If nothing better is proposed, just call it "doc".  It's not
hard to figure out that "doc" means everything except the man
pages (and it's not hard to say that somewhere).  Of course, if
somebody comes up with a better name than doc, then I'm all for
it.  But I am convinced that splitting this stuff into "books"
and "articles" is a mistake -- and exactly the kind of mistake
that should be strenuously avoided at a time like this when the
whole structure is being revamped anyway.

The other comment I'd make is that it's time to stop using names
with upper case in them.  If there is a strong historical reason
why lots of people will be seriously inconvenienced if names
like "FDP-primer" and "FAQ" are replaced by "fdp-primer" and
"faq", then this can be solved for the time being with symlinks
and a note that the symlinks are going to disappear when 4.x
comes out.

-- 
Greg Black <gjb@acm.org>



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