Re: No 6.05/.01 pdf book available

[Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org>]

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Hi Branden,

On 2023-08-12 03:48, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> Hi Alex,
> 
> At 2023-08-12T02:02:49+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
>> On 2023-08-07 18:21, Brian Inglis wrote:
>>>>> $ pwd
>>>>> /home/alx/src/linux/man-pages/man-pages/6.04/scripts/LinuxManBook
>>>>> $ ./BuildLinuxMan.pl  ../../
>>>>> [...]
>>>>> Failed to open 'DESC'
>>>
>>> That annoyingly minimal message provoked the patch submitted.
>>
>> Yeah; it took me some time to find the cause.  The error message
>> doesn't even tell who failed --was it the shell, was it gropdf, was it
>> troff?--.
>>
>> :)
> 
> This sort of thing makes me purple with rage and I have tried to purge
> groff of such unhelpful diagnostics--especially those that are uttered
> furtively by programs (or, worse, libraries) that attempt to remain
> anonymous.  Doug McIlroy was telling people to cut this crap out in 1986
> (or maybe a decade before that, even) and people _still_ ignore him.
> 
> https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reader.pdf (p. 9)

Hmm, that was an interesting read.  It explains a few inconsistencies
in the design of UNIX that I didn't understand.  I didn't know pipes
came so late into the timeline.  :)

Cheers,
Alex

> 
> Much work was done on groff 1.23 to fix this, but I'm not certain all
> such offenders have been rehabilitated.
> 
> https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?52463
> 
> When you encounter one, strike it with lightning.
> 
> Regards,
> Branden

-- 
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
GPG key fingerprint: A9348594CE31283A826FBDD8D57633D441E25BB5


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