Re: [HACKERS] Re: [ANNOUNCE] New man pages

> I'd like to see us change away from putting SQL commands in section l
> (ell), simply because that doesn't work on HPUX. Something like 8l
> or 8s would work a lot better for me. However, I'm not sure which
> major section to use --- there doesn't seem to be very much cross-
> platform standardization about the meanings of the sections beyond 4.
> On BSD, section 8 seems to contain admin programs (the stuff HPUX
> keeps in 1m). I don't see any sections on either my HPUX box or
> a nearby BSD box that contain pages for individual keywords of
> a programming language...

Oliver uses section 7 (miscellaneous...) for SQL commands, which seems
to be the right choice given the guidelines for Debian, RedHat, FHS,
and my imprecise impression of what is typical.

> > otoh, it does eliminate the possibility of man page pollution if we
> > manage to have the same man page name as some other existing page.
> > *That* would be a bad thing. And in general adding ~75 man pages to
> > existing sections is a pretty big load...
> As long as we install into /usr/local/pgsql/man/man*, naming conflicts
> with other packages aren't too big a deal --- there's no physical file
> conflict, and people can just add or remove /usr/local/pgsql/man/ in
> their MANPATH settings to see or not see Postgres manpages.

Yeah, but "we" don't always install into /usr/local/pgsql, though we
can suggest that as a possibility.

btw, on my Solaris boxes MANPATH is worse than useless; if you specify
it then none of the other paths mentioned in /etc/man.config (or
wherever that is on Solaris) get used. So you have to recreate all of
the default MANPATH settings in your environment variable. Of course,
now that I've whined about this perhaps someone knows a way around
this?

Is there any concern about using "l" (ell) for the section
discriminator?

So, I'll count you as not objecting to sections "1l" (one-ell) and
"7l" (seven-ell), ok?

- Thomas

--
Thomas Lockhart lockhart(at)alumni(dot)caltech(dot)edu
South Pasadena, California