Re: Manual Pages for GNUmach
Thu, 3 Aug 2000 01:38:53 -0400 (EDT), Roland McGrath <roland@gnu.org> wrote:
> I'm not sure it is worthwhile or desireable to add these to the gnumach
> sources.
keeping the man pages outside the source tree is IMHO not a good idea.
There are many reasons for bundling those man pages with gnumach. Among
others:
1. The man pages must be synchronized to the current sources. Keeping
them inside of gnumach is the easiest way to ensure, that developers
always get the most current version of the pages along with the
sources. Of course, we could always point to a separate package of
man pages, but why add to the proliferation of smallisch packages
a la Debian and contribute to the general confusion?
2. gnumach's main use[r] may be the Hurd, but it's not the only possible
system. Some people _are_ trying to build kernelized systems on top
of gnumach without using glibc or the Hurd (although it may seem
foolish ;-)) and those developers would probably also prefer to have
the man pages that go with the kernel in the gnumach sourcetree.
3. Most decent programs come with their own docs, including man pages,
in a single tar ball. Imagine the confusion, if all GNU programs were
distributed separate from their docs (Yuck!).
Of course, there are lots of docs about Mach that I wouldn't want to
see included in gnumach sources, but the man pages of the basic
syscalls and interfaces certainly belong to the basic docs (IMO).
> But certainly they should be made easily available. Perhaps you
> would like to put together a mach-docs package that could be distributed on
> gnu ftp sites, as well as set these up to be readable via the hurddocs
> web site?
Well, I'll verify the pages starting next week and will make the actualized
version available somewhere. But since I'm not involved with the hurddocs
project nor with Debian, all I can do is provide a tar ball of the updated
man pages.
-Farid.
--
Farid Hajji -- Unix Systems and Network Administrator | Phone: +49-2131-67-555
Broicherdorfstr. 83, D-41564 Kaarst, Germany | farid.hajji@ob.kamp.net
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