I totally agree with Garrett on this: 1. There should only be one man page that is maintained. 2. If the --man option is included, it should reference the man page data and not internal binary text. I think everyone would be happier with updating the man page for a command once, instead of having to recompile the binaries for each command.
My concern here is consistency and standardization. We're already making the waters pretty murky with the plethora of common command versions/flavors (Sun, XPG4/6, BSD/UCB, GNU, etc.) in OpenSolaris. I do agree with the AST approach and hopefully in getting all our CLI tools to be 64-bit clean (still surprising Tru64 was the only one that succeeded in that). I also don't really care for the GNUisms, if someone needs them they should all reside in /usr/gnu. Solaris and OpenSolaris are not UNIX-like OS's, they are UNIX. As such, the defaults should always be the UNIX commands. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Octave J. Orgeron Solaris Virtualization Architect and Consultant Web: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com E-Mail: unixconsole at yahoo.com *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* ----- Original Message ---- From: Garrett D'Amore <gdam...@sun.com> To: Chris Pickett <pkchris at users.sourceforge.net> Cc: Korn Shell 93 integration/migration project discussion <ksh93-integration-discuss at opensolaris.org>; PSARC-ext at sun.com; Alan Coopersmith <Alan.Coopersmith at sun.com>; busybox-dev at opensolaris.org Sent: Saturday, July 25, 2009 1:32:27 PM Subject: Re: [ksh93-integration-discuss] AST versions of fold, mktemp, pathchk, & tty [PSARC/2009/414 FastTrack timeout 07/31/2009] 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 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 -- 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.) - Garrett _______________________________________________ opensolaris-arc mailing list opensolaris-arc at opensolaris.org
