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Re: [Groff] Copyright notices in groff's man pages
From: |
Werner LEMBERG |
Subject: |
Re: [Groff] Copyright notices in groff's man pages |
Date: |
Sat, 04 Nov 2017 17:40:19 +0100 (CET) |
>> (A) Make man pages' copyright and permission notices visible in the
>> roff source file only, and put them in plain ASCII in comments.
>> Stop defining macros for them. Author information, if present,
>> can be directly inlined into the man page, not stuffed into a
>> private macro to be popped later.
>
> FWIW, i'm strongly in favour of that option.
Me too.
> I consider Copyright notices in the user interface, that is, in
> manual pages, and even a bit worse in stdout or stderr of the
> program, outright rude and disrespectful of the user [...]
Well, I suggest we simply follow the GNU standards; the exact rules
can be found in the `maintain.texi' info file. In case you don't have
it on your system, you can get an up-to-date copy from
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/tree/doc/maintain.texi
Section 6.5 `Copyright Notices' should cover all details.
> I have always found it unfortunate that groff, which is used a lot
> as a documentation formatter and does have some well-merited
> authority in that area, is setting this horrible example that people
> might follow.
If people are going to improve this, fine :-)
> In stdout and stderr, every unnecessary word is a very serious
> nuisance, and two additional lines are hellish, they make stuff
> scroll off the screen and bury the output i'm looking for in heaps
> of crap.
Please don't generalize too much. groff is a filter, so it doesn't
produce any additional output to stdout at all. However, if you
explicitly call `groff --version', I *expect* a copyright and license
notice.
Also note that your BSD point of view is probably different to what
GNU and the FSF expect.
> Don't worry about the exact format.
Yep. However, having identical entries in all files makes gnulib's
`update-copyright' script work better.
Werner