Re: [PATCH 2/9] ldconfig.8: Fix style nits

["G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>]

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Hi Alex,

At 2023-01-05T13:03:01+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> On 1/4/23 21:04, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > Official GNU resistance to man pages is broad and deep, but not
> > universal.
> 
> Is there still resistance apart from written?

This is hard to me to judge, but I also interpret unorthodox man page
typography as constitutive of resistance.  I credit Albert Cahalan with
giving me a formative experience in reading a man page that was written
with resentment.[1]  Countless thousands of Debian ps(1) page readers,
often under stress trying to figure out how to identify and kill a rogue
process, attempted self-help and found themselves served a dinner plate
of steaming documentary hostility, innocent bystanders caught up in a
pointless vendetta against a text formatting language.

When Mr. Cahalan passes, I hope his family has the funds to engrave the
first comment block from his ps(1) rewrite on his headstone.

> Most contributors to GNU today seem to use man pages.  There are still
> a few projects, like make(1) which would be better with manual pages
> documenting the language, but most have useful manual pages, don't
> they?

GNU programs whose manuals have Invariant Sections or Cover Texts under
the FDL tend also to lack freely-licensed man pages.

Fortunately groff doesn't have this problem, because it's all
dual-licensed GPL.

> Maybe Debian helped get there.

I'd like to think so.  I was around when Debian still took a lot of crap
for adopting that stance.  Now it has users who weren't born yet when
that policy decision was made.

If you don't have further comments on v2 I'll make a few more changes to
v3 and submit it.

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/blob/7ac9a0e1f5606696dc799b773d5ec70183ca91a3/ps/ps.1

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