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From: Alexis <flexibeast@gmail.com>
To: "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>
Cc: discuss@mandoc.bsd.lv, groff@gnu.org, man-db-devel@nongnu.org
Subject: Re: Behaviour of .so differs between mandoc and groff
Date: Wed, 03 May 2023 10:27:53 +1000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <87cz3ixnn2.fsf@ada> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20230430120555.3mydcm7qmbsf75v6@illithid>


"G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> writes:

> In practice, as I understand it, `so` doesn't achieve anything 
> for man
> pages that can't be done with symbolic links and (importantly) a 
> man
> page indexer that is symlink-aware.  Perhaps `so` support was 
> preserved,
> and its practice retained, for a long time because at one point 
> in the
> 1980s I think there was an AT&T/BSD split over symbolic links 
> even being
> supported by the kernel.  (And, to be fair, symbolic links are 
> something
> of a hack that can make file system operations more painful.  I 
> see from
> the nftw() man page that they were still doing so as late as 
> glibc 2.30,
> 3 years ago.)
>
> Does this help?

Thanks, i've just opened a bug on the Gentoo bug tracker about 
this, "man pages for alternatives: Use of .so instead of symlink 
creates issue when using mandoc":

    https://bugs.gentoo.org/905624

in which i reference this thread.


Alexis.
--
 To unsubscribe send an email to discuss+unsubscribe@mandoc.bsd.lv


  parent reply	other threads:[~2023-05-03  0:30 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 6+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2023-04-22  4:21 Alexis
2023-04-29 23:24 ` Alexis
     [not found]   ` <20230430120555.3mydcm7qmbsf75v6@illithid>
2023-05-03  0:27     ` Alexis [this message]
2023-05-04  5:44     ` Alexis
2023-05-04  6:18       ` Jan Stary
2023-05-04  7:13         ` Alexis

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