On Wed, 10 Dec 1997, Hubert Feyrer wrote:

: > - man to accept the SVR4-style '-s' option to indicate a section, which
: > accepts more than just one digit (using BSD syntax for this works in
: > conjunction with our current man(1) implementation, but is a little bit of
: > breakage on the BSD 'standard' for man(1));
: 
: Ewww, "man -s". Why can't we make our make to accept e.g. "make 3f ..." instead
: (IF this is really necessary to extend man-categories, which i do not like
: anyways).

It does now, actually.  But I'd like to see man accept *both* formats; I've
spent much time getting used to the 'man <digit> <pagename>' and 'man -s
<section> <pagename>' formats.  Fortunately, our man only considers a
section valid if it is listed in man.conf; otherwise it is a page name.

: > - a section such as 7h for how-to documents, searched after sections 1, 8,
: > and 6, but before the rest listed in man.conf;
: >
: > - a manual page intro(7h) to describe the how-to section.
: 
: My $0.02 on howtos: Why not put them in /usr/share/doc in some format? It would
: be ok for users to just have plain ASCII files, I don't see a need to put them
: in ms, man or whatever format. (Assuming noone wants pretty-printed
: documentation ;)

Well, I actually do pretty-print doc to postscript and laser printer.
"troff -man pagename.1 | dpost | lp -dprinter" is a common thing for me to
type on Solaris (you can actually use 'man -t' now to do all of this), and
something similar on NetBSD won't be uncommon when I get a laser printer of
my own in a couple months.

In case you haven't pretty-printed a man page before, do it sometime.
You'll be rather impressed at the look of the page.

=====
== Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Business tv@lucent.com)
== Vierling's Axiom: The revolution won't be televised; it will be posted.