Re: Patch to make generated manpages use GFDL (fwd)

[Russ Allbery <rra at stanford dot edu>]

Joe Buck <jbuck@synopsys.COM> writes:

> Traditionally, section 6 had the games.  Section 7 is "miscellaneous",
> so perhaps that would be better.  It would be nice if, on a GNU/Linux
> system, one could type "man gpl" or "man lgpl" or "man gfdl" and get the
> license.

Unfortunately, man page sections other than 1, 2, and 3 differ extensively
between platforms.  On Solaris, for instance, section 7 is device
interfaces and section 5 is the miscellaneous stuff.  Likewise on HP-UX
and IRIX, so I'm guessing that's the standard for System V.  However,
section 5 on GNU/Linux is file formats (which on Solaris is section 4),
and on GNU/Linux, section 4 is device interfaces.

5 is probably least wrong on the most platforms, but unfortunately one of
the platforms on which it's wrong is GNU/Linux.

(Personally, I'd be very tempted to just put the man page in section 1,
since a lot of other packages just use section 1 as a dumping ground, but
that's not really the *best* solution.)

Incidentally, emacs already ships a gfdl man page as of 21.1, and installs
it in section 1.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>