hwclock and time gazworks (was Re: Scary bugs)
On Sun, Jan 30, 2000 at 02:00:25PM -0200, Henrique M Holschuh wrote:
> On Sun, 30 Jan 2000, Thierry Laronde wrote:
> > On Sun, Jan 30, 2000 at 12:07:09PM -0200, Henrique M Holschuh wrote:
> > >
> > > I've just noticed an *EVIL* piece of misinformation (for Debian) in man
> > > hwclock, which implies that the user should use hwclock to set the RTC
> > > without mangling the system clock and reboot to update the system clock.
> > > THIS might be one of the causes of all this mess, since we currently have
> > > --systohc enabled. Added to the list of small doc updates.
> > >
> >
> > I think that this is a *bad* idea to modify a man page because of some
> > specificities of the installation (as you point out, the man page can be
>
> Hmm... you're right, of course. I was going to add a small Debian users:
> paragraph, but I can either leave it alone, or add a one line to the top of
> the man page: "Debian users: Please read (file) before using this program,
> or you risk clock nightmares."
[ you have done the work ( a good one :) for potato. What follows is for
woody now]
My first reaction about modifying the man page for `hwclock' was `no'
because we must not put distribution specific issues in a man (1) page.
But there is a corollary : no system (distribution) specific issues have
to be put in the man 1 page.
So, you are right about the man page of hwclock : it's in some regards
inaccurate, because it speeks about system problems, or, at least, makes
some dangerous presuppositions.
So, indeed, we can rework, for woody, hwclock manpage, if we, IMHO, keep
in mind the following :
- a man (1) page must *NOT* be Debian specific, nor any distribution
specific; it must be an "objective" description of what the program is
supposed to do, and how it can perform its task. A "SEE ALSO" pointer
has to be put for an eventual man page in section 8, describing how
the program is handle in the system/distribution specific environment;
- in section 8, we could creat a kind of meta-section, namely `time'
describing the Debian policy about these issues;
Any comments welcome.
Cheers,
--
Thierry LARONDE
thierry.laronde@polynum.com
website : http://www.polynum.com
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