By the way, the timer is set for the 29th. If anyone feels that this 
is not a sufficient time given the holiday, please speak up.

One thing that came up is regarding the man page. There seems to be a 
desire to publish man pages "as is", with as few changes as possible 
for FOSS porting projects. For instance, this project is delivering 
exctags and the man page will be exctags.1, but the synopsis will show 
  two executables, ctags and etags, only one of which is being 
delivered and not under that name. It was pointed out to me that this 
follows existing practice. For instance, gmake is delivered with a man 
page that says "make" in the synopsis.

This practice seems wrong to me. The man page should reflect the 
project as delivered, anything else is just confusing. I can accept 
that HTML files, info files, etc., may be delivered "as is", but to me 
the man page is the primary documentation interface to the user. We 
expect the user to infer interface stability from man pages, i.e. if 
there isn't a man page, then the interface is private. If we allow man 
pages to be misleading, you get into a situation like in the movie 
Fargo, where in the first scene, as part of the fiction, it says that 
the movie is true. If you can't trust the man page to document what is 
  reality, what can you trust?

Brian Utterback wrote:
> I am submitting this fastrack on behalf of Thomas Preisler.
> 
> Exposure is open.
> 
> Template Version: @(#)sac_nextcase %I% %G% SMI
> This information is Copyright 2008 Sun Microsystems
> 1. Introduction
>     1.1. Project/Component Working Name:
>      Exuberant CTags
>     1.2. Name of Document Author/Supplier:
>      Author:  Brian Utterback
>     1.3  Date of This Document:
>     22 December, 2008
> 4. Technical Description
> 
> Exuberant Ctags is a multilanguage reimplementation of the Unix ctags 
> program. It generates an index of source code object definitions which 
> is used by a number of editors and tools to instantly locate the 
> definitions. Exuberant Ctags currently supports the following languages:
>   Assembler, ASP, AWK, BETA, C, C++, C#, COBOL, Eiffel, Erlang,
>   Fortran, HTML, Java, Javascript, Lisp, Lua, Make, Pascal, Perl,
>   PHP, PL/SQL, Python, REXX, Ruby, Scheme,
>   Shell (Bourne, Korn, Z), S-Lang, SML (Standard ML), Tcl, Vera,
>   Verilog, Vim, and YACC.
> 
> This project proposes to deliver the ctags binary from the Exuberant 
> CTags FOSS project renamed to exctags to avoid conflict with the 
> existing ctags binary currently delivered as part of the SUNWtoo 
> programming tools package. This follows the already established 
> convention used by other platforms.
> 
> The FOSSchecklist and man page are enclosed for review.
> 
> A minor/patch binding is requested.
> 

-- 
blu

"Murderous organizations have increased in size and scope; they are
more daring, they are served by the most terrible weapons offered by
modern science, and the world is nowadays threatened by new forces
which, if recklessly unchained, may some day wreck universal
destruction."  - Arthur Griffith, 1898
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Brian Utterback - Solaris RPE, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Ph:877-259-7345, Em:brian.utterback-at-ess-you-enn-dot-kom

Reply via email to