Re: Opinions on .Dd?

[Jason McIntyre <jmc@kerhand.co.uk>]

On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 04:56:42PM +0200, Kristaps Dzonsons wrote:
> 
> % cat foo.3
> .Dd
> .Dt FOO 1
> .Os
> .Sh NAME
> .Nm foo
> .Nd bar
> .Sh DESCRIPTION
> Moo.
> % nroff -mandoc foo.3
> FOO(1)             BSD General Commands Manual            FOO(1)
> 
> NAME
>      foo - bar
> 
> DESCRIPTION
>      Moo.
> 
> BSD                           Epoch                          BSD
> 
> (Note groff output chopped, as they don't have our awesome -Owidth
> argument.)  This is on GNU/Linux (groff 1.18.1).  I also tested on
> OpenBSD and NetBSD.  Same.
> 

ah. i like it!

> If you enter an invalid string, say, `.Dd urgle', then you get the
> current date.
> 

ah, ok. just w/o args gets you Epoch. i was confused because i thought
you were trying to say that Dd did not accept arguments.

> > even so, i think it would be great to print "Epoch". there is no
> > difference between "Epoch" and "", except a little humour.
> 
> I actually think it's a bug.
> 

well, it's a great one. please don;t remove it. "Epoch" is exactly the
correct thing to do.

> What I was getting at, regarding (e.g.) DFBSD and what to put in the
> `Dd' field, is maybe they're best off leaving it blank.
> 

i don;t see the point of that. a ton of work to make things less useful.

> > 
> > 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.
> 
> Single page, I think.  Are there really so many differences?
> 

my previous mail listed some between netbsd and openbsd. there are
probably not too many, i think, but that doesn;t mean there won;t be
more. single page is the easiest way to go for sure. but like, will
freebsd dudes want a list of openbsd's differences in their man page(s)?
and vice versa?

jmc
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