Re: mdoc EXIT STATUS (Was: pending open issues)

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

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 04:33:17PM +0400, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> > 
> > what exactly is the purpose of having two sections? how do you separate
> > application diagnostics from their return codes?
> 
> Well, exit statuses and diagnostic messages aren't necessarily related.
> Like I said, the main reason for introducing the EXIT STATUS section
> was to follow POSIX.  DIAGNOSTICS was left untouched for documenting
> diagnostic messages.  POSIX uses STDERR for this purpose, let me quote
> the relevant text:
> 
> : The STDERR section describes the standard error output of
> : the utility. Only those messages that are purposely sent by
> : the utility are described.

[snip]

thanks, that's clarified some questions i had. i'll wait and see what
netbsd people have to say too. i think though, that we probably won;t
reinstate EXIT STATUS - it feels too silly having a section for what
essentially amounts to a single sentence.

> 
> > i'm struggling to find a page (sections 1, 6, or 8) where DIAGNOSTICS
> > makes sense. i cannot even find any posix pages with it. or are you just
> > using DIAGNOSTICS for section 4?
> 
> See http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?route for one such
> example.
> 

yes, that seems to be one of the few 1/6/8 pages with a reasonable
DIAGNOSTICS section.

jmc
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