On 7/26/09, Garrett D'Amore <gdamore at sun.com> wrote:
> Roland Mainz wrote:
>
> > John Sonnenschein wrote:
> >
> >
> > > On 25-Jul-09, at 4:59 PM, James Carlson wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > > John Sonnenschein wrote:
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > > I've got a question about this...
> > > > > Whose responsibility is it to update the man pages and --man
> > > > > command then? The people whose jobs it is to update man pages, or
> > > > > the people whose jobs it is to update the command line utility?
> > > > > Basically if a new flag is added in the future for some reason, how
> > > > > will one synchronize the man pages?
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > Usually, that's done by filing a bug against the man pages.
> > > >
> > > > The advantage of keeping the documentation separate is that it's in
> > > > the hands of professional documentation writers, who are able to
> > > > keep a consistent style across all of the system man pages.
> > > >
> > > > I'm with Garrett about the inadvisability of baking man page
> > > > documentation into executables, but for ksh93-related things, I
> > > > think that ship has unfortunately sailed.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > Sure but for the sake of argument if we have some tools that have --
> > > man and also man pages, does that mean that the docs people will be
> > > putting back to ON,
> > >
> > >
> >
> > Erm... why should the documentation people do putback into OS/Net ? The
> > strings used by getopts are used for argument parsing and are - as "nice
> > side-effect" - reused to generate the output for --help, --version,
> > --man etc.
> >
> >
>
>  I have no objections to --version, --help.  My concerns relate to --man,
> --nroff, and --html.
>
>
> >
> >
> > > or will there be a desynchronization between the
> > > man pages and the --man pages ?
> > >
> > >
> >
> > They _may_ be out-of-sync shortly after code putback if we add new
> > options to the |getopts()| string until the documentation folks caught
> > up with the code changes. But as I am trying to say over and over again
> > (and I am starting to feel _ignored_) that the output for --help, --man
> > etc. is generated from the getopts string template used for argument
> > parsing. This string is there to "drive" the argument parsing and is
> > absolutely the wrong place for Solaris-specific edits. We have a real,
> > seperate and maintained manual page for that purpose ([1]).
> >
> >
>
>  Apparently the upstream disagrees with you.  They (well Glenn) in fact
> *recommend* that the man page generated automatically from the --nroff
> output.
>
>
> > [1]=(And as said _several_ times that we could use a DocBook/XML manual
> > page as master source file shared between documentation and code folks
> > in the future from which both the Solaris manpage and the getopts string
> > can be generated from (this would eliminate all the "manpages
> > out-of-sync" concerns described in this thread))
> >
> >
>
>  That helps address some, but not all, of the concerns.  You still wind up
> with the situation of two physical copies of the documentation on the media.
>
>  This approach also seems not to match what the upstream suppliers seem to
> be saying...
>
>  I rather strongly suspect that in the end we will be faced with one of two
> choices:
>
>  1) fork the code base and do what we feel is right for Solaris, or

Didn't you read what Roland wrote about the project rules?
> in several major and unbreakable rules for this project which
> includes:
> - WE DO NOT FORK THE CODE
> - WE DO NOT BREAK THE KSH93 TEST SUITE
> - THE KSH93 TEST SUITE IS COMPLETELY OFF-LIMITS FOR CHANGES

If you are forking the code with such unnecessary changes I will NO
LONGER CONTRIBUTE to this or any other Opensolaris.org project.

Jenny
-- 
Jennifer Pioch, Uni Frankfurt

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