[illumos-Developer] Illumos ARC 2010/001 BSD man page support for Illumos

[Joerg Schilling]

"Garrett D'Amore" <garrett at nexenta.com> wrote:

> > and to change the man(1) command to call "nroff -mandoc" instead of
> > "nroff -man".
>
> I must say I'm of a mixed mind.  While I don't mind seeing fixes to 
> bugs, I worry that if we create documentation in a format that is not 
> acceptable to the upstream it will create undue barriers to upstream 
> integration.
>
> In fact, ON currently lacks *any* manual pages, and this is probably the 
> case for a level 0 type question (in ARC parlance) -- that is what are 
> we going to do about manual pages?  I have some thoughts here, but the 
> challenge of balancing the need for updated docs against unnecessary 
> divergence from upstream needs to be balanced.

It depends on how you take things, there is a tarball with man pages,
but these man pages are unacceptable for us:

-	They have been created with software we don't own

-	They are in a reeally bad state and it takes aprox one hour per
	man page to convert it manually into a standard format that
	can be edited.

Upstream handles man page in a different way than we and I don't see 
any collision. The man page extension just gives us more freedom
to view man pages from other upstream entities.

Jörg

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