Re: GSoC Project Status Update: Apropos Replacement

[Jukka Ruohonen <jruohonen%iki.fi@localhost>]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 11:57:55PM +0530, Abhinav Upadhyay wrote:
> A more detailed information on my blog post:
> http://abhinav-upadhyay.blogspot.com/2011/06/netbsd-gsoc-weekly-report-2.html

Just a footnote. I'll quote the above blog entry:

  "Handling .Nm macros: .Nm macros seem to be special in the syntax of man
   pages. From what I have seen, the argument for the .Nm macro is
   specified only at the beginning of the man page (usually the NAME
   section) and after that if at any place in the rest of the man page
   .Nm macros is used, the parser will replace it with its original
   value specified previously at the top.  So at the present moment, we
   are unable to handle this. So wherever .Nm macros is used again, it
   is being simply ignored."

I recall having a discussion with Thomas about this and neither of us were
that keen on using anything but a single .Nm as an identifier. So the above
sounds right to me. Take something like pmf(9): a big, paragraph-like,
.Nm-list just clutters the page and should be removed, IMO. I think those
multiple .Nm's were used because of the primitiveness of apropos(1).

- Jukka.