Re: Chapters of the manual (was: Bug#1018737: /usr/bin/rst2man: rst2man: .TH 5th field shouldn't be empty)

[Alejandro Colomar]

Hi Andries!

On 11/17/22 00:40, Andries E. Brouwer wrote:
> > On 9/7/22 00:13, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> > > > > I've seen sporadically references to the numbers as chapters, probably
> > > > > from when the manual was a proper book, but that term seems to have
> > > > > fallen in use.
>
> Unix Programmer's Manual (4.2 BSD) August, 1983
> Volume 1
> Chapter I: Commands: intro, adb, ...
> Chapter II: System calls: intro, accept, access, ...
> Chapter III: Subroutines: intro, abort, abs, ...
> Chapter IV: Special files: intro, acc, ...
> Chapter V: File formats and conventions: a.out, ...
> Chapter VI: Games: aardvark, adventure, ...
> Chapter VII: Macro packages and language conventions: intro, ascii, ...
> Chapter VIII: Maintenance commands and procedures: intro, ac, ...
>
> Seventh Edition, January, 1979
> Volume 2A
> 1 and 2: General Works
> 3 through 7: Getting Started
> 8 through 13: Document Preparation
> 14 through 18: Programming
>
> Volume 2B:
> 19 through 28: Supporting Tools and Languages
> 29 through 38: Implementation, Maintenance and Miscellaneous
> ...
>
> Volume 1 had chapters. The later volumes had numbered documents.

Thanks for the prompt reply!
'chapter' definitely makes more sense, at least considering the manual as a 
book.  Since it seems to have been in general use in the past, it's not so much 
of a breaking change to start using it now again.  So, to avoid ambiguity 
between section referring to a chapter or section referring to part of a page, 
I'll start using the term [sub]chapter consistently.

With time, I expect to replace all occurrences of section that should be chapter 
in the man-pages.

> Andries

Cheers,

Alex

--
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>

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