Hi Theo, Theo Buehler wrote on Tue, Aug 02, 2016 at 12:31:43AM +0200:
> I don't think so. The numbers are added in the link text to make it > plain that we link to a man page and since this is the usual form of > referring to a man pgae. However, we try to omit the numbers from the > link itself whenever possible. Not sure how useful the additional effort to "omit the numbers whenever possible" is. The semantics of http://man.openbsd.org/foo is: Show me a manual page named "foo"; i don't know or don't care in whichever section it might be. The semantics of http://man.openbsd.org/foo.1 is: Show me a manual page named "foo" from section "1". So if you actually know the section and care about it, it seems less work and less error-prone to me to type these two bytes than to try and consider (or test) whether omitting the number is OK in a particular case. Besides, it sometimes happens that a page editline(3) already exists and a new page editline(7) is created much later. Links omitting the section number that used to be correct can suddenly become wrong in similar cases. And we had a number of cases already where people decided to omit the section number even though it was actually required. Of course, whoever does the work of painting gets to decide the colour of the bikeshed, and i certainly don't feel strongly about this either way. Just saying in case you want to consider it. Yours, Ingo P.S. In special cases, advanced users can play with this for special effects. http://man.openbsd.org/malloc.3 shows just malloc(3) and nothing else. http://man.openbsd.org/malloc shows the same page, but an additional hyperlink to malloc(9) above the top of the page.
