Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 13:22:05 -0400 From: Bob Johnson <bobj@atlantic.net> To: Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@uunet.co.za>, doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Improving STANDARDS section of the manual domain Message-ID: <00062213314401.02384@scanner.engnet.ufl.edu> In-Reply-To: <43674.961682800@axl.ops.uunet.co.za> References: <43674.961682800@axl.ops.uunet.co.za>
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On Thu, 22 Jun 2000, Sheldon Hearn wrote: > [...] > One danger in this approach, pointed out to me by Mark Murray, is that > it is easy for new options to be added and existing options to be > changed without regard for the STANDARDS section. > > While this is true, the alternative seems to be to clutter the rest > of the manual page with parenthesized chirps for each option and > characteristic. I don't like that idea, and I'd prefer to simply say > that folks with an interest in the manual domain need to watch it like a > hawk for bit rot. Some of us already do so. > [...] This idea is sort of half-baked, but it may be worth something: What if you set up a system of tags that tie pieces of the STANDARDS section of a man page to passages within the main body of the page? The idea would be to set up a system to watch for changes in one that need to be investigated for their impact on the other. You obviously can't try to catch everything this way or you'd just link the entire page back to the STANDARDS section, which gains you nothing. But you could link individual descriptions of options to corresponding phrases in the STANDARDS section, so that if the description of the option changes, a STANDARDS reviewer can be alerted to check to see whether compliance has changed. -- Bob To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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