Re: ANN: ncurses-6.4-20230617

[Thomas Dickey]

----- Original Message -----
| From: "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>
| To: "Ncurses Mailing List" <bug-ncurses@gnu.org>
| Cc: "Sven Joachim" <svenjoac@gmx.de>
| Sent: Sunday, June 25, 2023 6:16:43 AM
| Subject: Re: ANN: ncurses-6.4-20230617

| At 2023-06-25T11:09:46+0200, Sven Joachim wrote:
|> On 2023-06-17 19:53 -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
|> > At 2023-06-17T21:33:04+0000, Thomas Dickey wrote:
|> >> 20230617
|> >>   + markup manpages with revision information (prompted by
|> >>     discussion with Bjarni Ingi Gislason).
|> >
|> > Thank you for this; it's a definite quality of life improvement for
|> > those who spend a lot of time looking at man pages.
|> 
|> Indeed.  Unfortunately there is a small problem: with the
|> "--with-manpage-renames" option (default in Debian), the .TH lines no
|> longer get replaced, and Debian's lintian tool goes nuts about it.

I noticed that with my test-package (which uses a different suffix),
and had intended investigating that this weekend, but the out-of-memory
fixes got my attention.

That, and the Windows port issue are still on my to-do list.

|> 
|> ,----
|> | W: ncurses-bin: wrong-manual-section 1 != 1M
|> | [usr/share/man/man1/captoinfo.1.gz:32]
|> | W: ncurses-bin: wrong-manual-section 1 != 1M
|> | [usr/share/man/man1/infocmp.1.gz:32]
|> | W: ncurses-bin: wrong-manual-section 1 != 1M
|> | [usr/share/man/man1/infotocap.1.gz:32]
|> | W: ncurses-bin: wrong-manual-section 1 != 1M 
[usr/share/man/man1/tic.1.gz:31]
|> | W: ncurses-bin: wrong-manual-section 1 != 1M 
[usr/share/man/man1/toe.1.gz:31]
|> | W: ncurses-doc: wrong-manual-section 3curses != 3X
|> | [usr/share/man/man3/panel.3curses.gz:31]
|> | W: ncurses-doc: wrong-manual-section 3form != 3X
|> | [usr/share/man/man3/cursor.3form.gz:32]
|> | ... [100+ similar lines skipped]
|> `----
|> 
|> It seems that man/make_sed.sh has to be updated for the improved .TH
|> lines, but I have not looked what exactly needs to be done.
| 
| Might I suggest dropping the sectioning suffixes from ncurses' man
| pages?

_that_ is outside the scope of this mailing list.

| 
| The convention in use descends from, I believe, the Version 7 Unix
| manual,[1] where, for section 3, the section/suffixes were as follows:
| 
| 3C    stdio library functions
| 3M    math library functions
| 3X    "various specialized libraries [without] distinctive captions"
| 
| An unadorned "3" applied to functions from the (pre-standard!) C (and
| Fortran) runtime library that were neither stdio nor math components.[2]
| (The naïve reader might wonder why abs(3) was not a "math" function.)
| 
| Version 7 also proposed a partitioning of the section 1 space, which,
| apart from 1M, seems not to have lasted long.[3]  (When's the last time
| you saw a man page in section 1G?)
| 
| By 4.4BSD, Berkeley Unix seems to have abandoned these conventions.[4]
| 
| System V Unix seems to have clung to them.  I was tempted to say "for
| longer", but by the time 4.4BSD finally came out, System V was ossifying
| at great speed.  GNU/Linux, arising in this same period, seems to have
| treated man page section suffixes largely with disregard.
| 
| Given the long-standing divergence in practice, with no prospect of its
| resurrection, and the fact that a system providing multiple curses
| implementations may well have to relocate or rename the man pages of one
| or more such implementations upon installation anyway,[5] I propose that
| it would be simpler for ncurses to just get rid of the suffixes.
| 
| Lest anyone feel that I'm picking on ncurses, I note that X.Org needs
| its windmilling man pages tilted at in similar fashion.
| 
| I have a follow-up idea if this one's not too shocking.  Let me know.
| 
| Regards,
| Branden
| 
| [1] https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/man/man3/intro.3
| [2] https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/man/man3/
| [3] https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/man/man1/intro.1
| [4] Contrast
|    https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.3BSD/usr/man/man3/intro.3
|    with
|    
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.4BSD/usr/src/share/man/man3/intro.3
|    (and mind the conversion from man(7) to mdoc(7) macros).
| [5] I note that even the cryptic "curs_" file names that most ncurses
|    man pages use are identical to those from the System V Interface
|    Definition.  These would be the pages that Eric Raymond claimed were
|    not under copyright, and that he "reverse nroffed" upon import into
|    ncurses about 29 years ago.[6]  Fortunately, decades of relentless
|    rewriting by Thomas Dickey and others, and the possibility of SVID
|    being an "orphaned work"[7] render this assessment less ominous than
|    it might otherwise be.
| [6] https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses-license.html#ncurses_1_8_5
| [7] https://www.copyright.gov/orphan/orphan-report.pdf

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <dickey@invisible-island.net>
https://invisible-island.net