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

[Andrew Pinski <pinskia at physics dot uc dot edu>]

Actually 5 is also files on BSDs.

Here is what FreeBSD says are the sections(from www.freebsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi)
and OpenBSD agrees with them (http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi):

1 - General Commands
2 - System Calls
3 - Subroutines
4 - Special Files
5 - File Formats
6 - Games
7 - Macros and Conventions
8 - Maintenance Commands
9 - Kernel Interface
n - New Commands


On Tuesday, November 6, 2001, at 07:51 , Russ Allbery wrote:

> 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/>