[TUHS] Project Idea: The UNIX Programmer's Manual: Heritage Edition

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, Sep 19, 2023 at 07:25:13PM -0700, Adam Thornton wrote:
> Yeah, I'm less angry at GNU now--I didn't search as hard, but when I found
> out 4.3BSD didn't have HISTORY (and neither does 2.11BSD, which is still
> actively-ish maintained) then I figured it wasn't something classical that
> GNU dropped, just never imported.  I feel like it existed on SunOS and
> Solaris but I might be wrong about that?  Was it really FreeBSD that
> introduced it?

I don't think SunOS had it.  The SunOS man pages were pretty terse, the
powers that be wanted just the facts.  I remember get beat up for putting
examples in some of the man pages I wrote, they got taken out "because
examples are for user guides, man pages are not user guides, they are a
reference guide" or something like that.

I like examples in man pages, I think it jump starts you into using the
program more easily but maybe that's just me.
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Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat