🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1989Jun19.021419.1512@telly.on.ca>, evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) writes:
> I've always semi-understood the layout of Unix man pages. But going through
> ...
> Specifically, I'm talking about the fact that some source distributions
> describe their executables under section 1 (elm, compress, cnews, conf,
> kermit, etc...). Yet others choose to put similar information in section 8
> (Bnews, smail) and a straggler or two likes yet something else such as
> cookie(6).

Section 1 is for the ordinary use programs; section 8 is for programs
used only by system administrators.

The following relates to the on-line manual files normally found
in the filesystem subtree rooted at /usr/man.

Some of the _man_ programs around have problems dealing with local
additions to the system. Putting their documentation into a separate
section has both advantages and disadvantages.

The obvious disadvantages are that you then have two places to look
instead of of one and there isn't a standard section defined for local
additions.

The advantage is that you can readily distinguish which programs
are local additions and may not be found on other systems even
though they have the full complement of facilities for the system
in use.

The natural way to handle this would be to place them in the same
section but flag the local additions with a distinctive suffix
(as, for example, BSD systems do for the libraries in section 3).
Unfortunately, some of the _man_ commands around can't handle this
in the file naming and you have to look inside the files to see their
classification.

This can be circumvented by, for example, having command man pages
appear not only in the man1 directory used by man but have links to
separate directories, say man1.local and man1.std.

 Thos Sumner       (thos@cca.ucsf.edu)   BITNET:  thos@ucsfcca
 (The I.G.)        (...ucbvax!ucsfcgl!cca.ucsf!thos)

 U.S. Mail:  Thos Sumner, Computer Center, Rm U-76, UCSF
             San Francisco, CA 94143-0704 USA

OS|2 -- an Operating System for puppets.

#include <disclaimer.std>