From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from kerhand.co.uk (_smtpd@82-69-137-214.dsl.in-addr.zen.co.uk [82.69.137.214]) by krisdoz.my.domain (8.14.3/8.14.3) with ESMTP id o6QEoN9O030939 for ; Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:50:24 -0400 (EDT) Received: from localhost (1000@localhost [IPv6:::1]) by kerhand.co.uk (OpenSMTPD) with ESMTP id VBzMvf3i for ; Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:49:54 +0100 (BST) Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:49:54 +0059 From: Jason McIntyre To: discuss@mdocml.bsd.lv Subject: Re: Opinions on .Dd? Message-ID: <20100726145018.GD24722@bramka.kerhand.co.uk> References: <4C4BBDE5.8020901@online.de> <20100725062509.GA22919@iris.usta.de> <4C4C292C.9020500@online.de> <4C4D90CA.8010607@bsd.lv> X-Mailinglist: mdocml-discuss Reply-To: discuss@mdocml.bsd.lv Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <4C4D90CA.8010607@bsd.lv> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.3i On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 03:42:34PM +0200, Kristaps Dzonsons wrote: > > Second thought: a manual date is in general ambiguous. What does it > mean? Last edit time? Last checkin? And what does it matter, > considering it usually can't be corroborated with corresponding binary > (or whatever)? > yes, one of the original problems was that you could never be sure what the date related to. some said it was for when the page was created (which i felt was useless), others that it got bumped only on "significant" updates, and so on. > > So I dug around and found that `Dd' accepts no arguments. It prints > "Epoch" in place of a date (wtf?). I think an empty `Dd' is less > ambiguous than a bogus date. (I'm now committing a fix to the effect > that `Dd' can be empty.) > what do you mean it accepts no arguments? it accepts the date. and does it really print "Epoch"? i thought if you messed the date up it just printed the current date. maybe i am wrong about that though. even so, i think it would be great to print "Epoch". there is no difference between "Epoch" and "", except a little humour. > > I'm happy with putting some notes to the extent of "Usage of the `Dd' > field is usually one of convention" and listing that OpenBSD exclusively > uses $Mdocdate$, whilst a general-purpose manual should use a hard-coded > or empty date. > > Thoughts? > this ties in with how do we handle OS differences... different pages, or a single page which notes differences. the latter might seem sane, but it could make the page unwieldy. jmc -- To unsubscribe send an email to discuss+unsubscribe@mdocml.bsd.lv