Re: [patch] standards.7: Added more references

["Alfie John" <alfie-pV9j36CBp5Q@public.gmane.org>]

Hey,

> I don't doubt that these are the best currently available books on
> their subject matter, but in the end, I don't think standards(7)
> should act as a bibliography.

> But my inclination would be to take the references to Gallmeister and
> Lewine out (both now rather dated), rather than add more references.
> And in fact, that is what I've done. (Adding more books to
> standards(7) would only lead me into temptation one day in the
> future.)

Are you sure that is the best thing to do? Man pages are there to help the
reader get a better picture. The more information the better I would have
thought.

What if somebody were to look at standards(7) and wanted to know more
information? Instead of going to what people considered the best material
available (be it books, websites etc), they would instead waste their time
searching and maybe getting inferior or incorrect information. This leads
to floods of questions to forums, IRC and mailing lists. And I'm sure one
common response to these type of questions is going to be "if you want
more info, the best place is X book"!

It would cut out the middle man if references were there from the
beginning :)

> So, sorry -- but I won't take this patch.

No problem. I'm just trying to help out people who are in the same boat as
me -- people wanting to know where the best place to find things are.
Maybe a man page called "unix-references", "unix-books" or
"programming-books" would be a better option.

Alfie
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