Hi,
Reuben ua Brig wrote:
> when OpenBSD is happy to change even man.conf
We change things when all of the following hold:
1. There is a significant problem to be solved, or a significant
profit to be gained. Regarding man.conf: the old format was
over-engineered, wordy, hard to use, too closely tied to
implementation details of the old man(1) and apropos(1)
programs, and ill-suited to work with the then-new mandoc.db(5).
2. Someone does the complete design and the complete implementation.
In the case of man.conf(5), that was me.
3. There is broad agreement among developers, *after* step 2 is
complete, that downsides are acceptable, that benefits suffienctly
outweigh the downsides, and that the design and implementation
meet our quality standards.
In the case of man.conf(5), most users weren't affected at all.
A few had to replace one big configuration file with a small one
that would be easier to maintain going forward. A tiny number
of people might no longer have been able to use idiosyncratic
configurations that didn't work all that well even before the
change and certainly weren't advisable in the first place;
but frankly, i don't recall a single report to that effect.
I can't talk about the internals of the mount(2) syscall,
so i pass on that one to people who know better.
That one thing is changed in a significant way does not imply
that something else is easy to improve as well.
Yours,
Ingo
