On Tue, Dec 16, 2025 at 9:42 AM Norwid Behrnd <[email protected]> wrote: > Is this discrepancy because the former is a sort by a computer, the later by > priority how frequently a typical user of groff likely engages one of them?
That's a plausible incentive for the man page order -- inasmuch as it's possible to gauge the behavior of the typical user of a FLOSS package that gathers no analytics. Certainly the first three get the most usage, and the last three the least. The Savannah list is mostly alphabetical: "Unknown" appears at the top, and "None" at the bottom, neither of those alphabetical with the other entries. This is in contrast to other lists, where "None" appears at the top. And for managers, who can change the Status field, that list is definitely not alphabetical (nor in any kind of logical order I can discern). So Savannah appears to offer some customization of ordering of some fields. But that's not one of the managerial powers, so I can't see what. If I could reorder the Category listing, personally I'd want to put the freestanding items (Core, General and Utilities) at the top, followed by the items that have subcategories (Driver, Font, Macro package, Preprocessor). But this is a lengthy dropdown, so alphabetical sorting probably helps users find their desired item the fastest.
