1 Jul 2026, 16:09 by [email protected]: > I have mixed feelings about the proposed change.
As I expected. I'm surprised that I'm the first person in 35+ years to mention this. > The man page is intended to be relatively brief and is explicitly not the > authoritative source - the manual is. I want my patch to answer the question "What exactly does this character class capture?" I think this is reasonable given all the variant regular expressions. In contrast, I don't know what value "You're stupid if you don't know this," adds, even if it is true. If the man page's target audience is people who know all of grep's features, then there's no need for a man page at all. To my experience, grep's character classes are unique to grep. It's not covered in https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/mastering-regular-expressions/0596528124/ or any of the online references I use - so I'm not sure how one can expect me to find them "self explanatory." The ASCII references and backslash equivalents (which I appreciate may have to be localised) are there for completeness. I would be fine with one or the other, preferring ASCII because it's more precise than describing non-alphanumeric characters. Alternatively, "Please see https://www.gnu.org/software/grep/manual/html_node/Character-Classes-and-Bracket-Expressions.html,"; is fine. > And the man page is already too long, That's subjective. To me, documentation is the "right" length if I can quickly find what I need to get the job done. I wrote the patch because it will make grep easier for me to use, and I hope other people, too. You are correct that my revision adds another ~530 bytes to the file. I can try to find ~530 bytes in other sections to trim down. Still, this seems like a political objection than an actual limit. Perhaps my ignorance can help differentiate between not enough and too much? > and it's a continual pain to maintain both sets of documentation. Again, I cannot comment on anyone's life choices or GNU's internal management. Realistically, how much is grep expected to change in the next 100 years? This seems like one of those set-and-forget things. However, you may be referring to the .po translations, to which I'll have to defer to your expertise.
