Re: Suggestion: "man git clone"

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Aug 22, 2008, 00:40 UTC
Message-ID: <20080822004052.GA30476@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <48AE035C.8000504@acm.org>

On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 08:07:56PM -0400, Federico Lucifredi wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> I am all for bass-ackwards compatibility, and I think the suggestion of  
> going on "man foo bar" :
>
>  1) look for foo-bar; if success, terminate search
>  2) look for foo
>  3) look for bar
>  ....
>
> may be acceptable - I don't see drawbacks at a first glance, and it would 
> allow for groups of pages to be meaningful.

Well, the drawback is that there exist X-Y such that X and Y both have manpages (e.g., cvs-debc on my debian box). So we are assuming that the risk is acceptably low of somebody asking for "man X Y", wanting two manpages, and that X and Y fit this pattern.

Personally I have never ever wanted to see two manpages from one man invocation, so I have no real problem with that assumption.

> Are you willing to put your patch where your mouth is? :-)

I've never looked at man code before, but there seem to be at least two man packages for Linux. My boxes have man-db 2.5.2.

-Peff