On 7/25/09, Garrett D'Amore <gdamore at sun.com> wrote:
> Chris Pickett wrote:
>
> > On 7/25/09, Garrett D'Amore <gdamore at sun.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > > My main concern here is the integration of manual page functionality
> into
> > > the commands themselves. I see both benefits and costs. The benefit is
> > > that the documentation is more likely to match the actual command. But
> part
> > > of the cost is a much higher cost to perform localization for these, and
> > > (depending on implementation) a potentially larger minimum size of the
> > > binaries. (I'm assuming for the moment that the documentation is stored
> in
> > > the binary, and the command is doing more than just executing some
> pipeline
> > > to access the manual content from /usr/share/man or whatever.)
> > >
> > > Personally, I think --man, --html and --nroff and such is a dangerous
> > > precedent to set.
> > >
> > >
> >
> > What about --help and --version? Do you object to those options, too?
> > Would you drop your concerns if Roland would rename --man to
> > --extended-help?
> >
> >
>
> When the --man output really is a manual page, I still object. It doesn't
> matter what you call it -- the problem is that we have two copies of the
> same information, the on-line manual page and the bits in the binary.
>
> Actually, if --man were to generate an actual man page by reading the man
> text from the on-disk file that is formatted by man(1) itself, then I would
> probably answer all (or very nearly so) of my concerns about this.
If you would've ever researched the implementation you would come to
the conclusion that this is not possible. The same string used for
argument parsing is the same string used to generate the help,
version, man, nroff and html output. There is no space wasted
*anywhere*.
> If you read my architectural concerns about this, then you'd understand why
> I have problems with it. (Right now it looks like I'm very much in the
> minority
Yes, you are.
>-- maybe a minority of one on this -- but if so then a vote on the
> issue will be easy for the project team to achieve, and costs nobody
> anything except me -- and the cost to me is that I'll have to write the
> resulting opinion.)
Where and when is such a vote done? Where can I vote?
Chris
--
^---^
(@)v(@) Chris Pickett
| / IT consultant
===m==m=== pkchris at users.sourceforge.net
