man

[Phil Edwards]

Levente Farkas <lfarkas@mindmaker.hu>:
> Benjamin Kosnik wrote:
> > This is certainly true! I'd love to see them. I don't have time to
> > organize this effort though, so it's up to y'all... I would definitely
> > work with whowever picks this up to include them in the standard distro.
>
> why not include the sgi's html documentation first ?
> it's a big part of the work and it's free. than it'd be easier to
> extend. on the other hand I think it's a real good documentation.

The current tips/tricks/reminders/howtos/FAQ has links to (and into) SGI's
documentation for exactly that reason; it's well-written and quite extensive.
That fact that it /is/ so extensive is why I've been only putting examples
and gotchas and so forth in our own HTML stuff; no sense in reinventing
the wheel (even if the spokes are prettier :-).

Bundling up their pages as part of libstdc++-v3 makes me skittish for a
few reasons, though.

  1)  It's free, but is rebundling it legal?  I haven't checked.

  2)  We'd forever be playing catch-up, as we get their docs, modify them
      to remove all the SGI extensions and bring them into line with what
      we're actually doing.  Then we'll get people reading one set of HTML
      files when they should have been reading the other one.  And by the
      time it's all sorted out, SGI will make a new release.  :-)

  3)  People -- like you and like me -- expect man pages to be available
      for a standard compiler library.  Shipping HTML docs that they
      already have access to only delays the problem.

I'm making some sketchy notes on the idea of writing manpages for -v3.
And as soon as I get some pesky "real world" stuff out of the way, I'll
probably start making space in the repository.  I had no idea there was
other interest in manpages.

Phil