[illumos-Developer] Layout of man sections

[Garrett D'Amore]

I concur largely.  The seperate sections may help when similar symbols are provided by different libraries (perhaps for different languages.)

I would not mind seeing a number without a suffix search the other sections starting with the same number though.

Albert Lee <trisk at opensolaris.org> wrote:

>On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 9:40 PM, Yuri Pankov <yuri.pankov at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I guess I already know the answer, but have to ask anyway.. :-)
>>
>> What do you all think about dropping the (useless, as there shouldn't be
>> duplicate pages) manpage section suffixes (there's more than 60 for
>> section 3, for example) and switching the sections to match those found
>> on BSD and Linux systems:
>>
>> 1, 2, 3 and 9 not changed
>> 1m (system administrator) becomes 8
>> 4 (formats) becomes 5
>> 5 (misc, standards, env., etc.) becomes 7
>> 7 (special files) becomes 4
>>
>> There's no defined reason for doing this really (other than me using
>> other OSes and finding the differences disturbing).
>>
>> Thanks in advance for any feedback..
>>
>
>We are an SVR4 derivative, so we use System V man page section names,
>whereas BSD followed the convention from System III and earlier (and
>Linux uses the BSD scheme). (I don't know why it changed between
>System III and V, though. Does anyone? [1]).
>
>System V used to be much more common than it is today, so the section
>names only became a "problem" as other Unixes died out. One possible
>way to kill two birds with one stone is to give man(1) a "BSD
>compatibility" feature when invoked as 'man <section> <name>' where it
>translates BSD names to SysV.
>
>The suffixes have bothered me for a while, but I think the
>classification of functions by library is useful and the right
>solution is to make man search with suffixes (so that e.g. both 'man
>-s 3SOCKET bind' and 'man -s 3 bind' work).
>
>I'd be okay with aliasing section 1M to 8, which is not reserved for
>anything else (although we already have a few pieces of software using
>8, probably due to lazy packaging).
>
>[1] Still haven't found where SVID, the SysV standard, specifies the sections
>-Albert
>
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