Re: Suggestion: "man git clone"

From: Federico Lucifredi <flucifredi@acm.org>
Date: Aug 22, 2008, 01:19 UTC
Message-ID: <48AE143C.8030704@acm.org>
In-Reply-To: <20080822004052.GA30476@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

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

That's right.

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

I expected as much, and we should have an option to disable the "new" behavior as a safety anyway.

>> 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.

There are two man packages for linux, man and man-db, the latter being a 90's fork that uses Berkeley DB as a backend to speedup man -k searches (it helped back then).

  Best -F

-- 
_________________________________________
-- "'Problem' is a bleak word for challenge" - Richard Fish
(Federico L. Lucifredi) - flucifredi@acm.org