On Mon, Sep 04, 2023 at 02:42:05AM +0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > However, nobody told me so far that they like the idea of showing this > information, but one developer told me privately that they are not a fan.
Let me guess. I know one guy who makes it known when he doesn't like something, but almost always in private. :) > That looks neat for the FVWM case - however, i fear some people might > like exactly the same feature less in this case: > > $ man ls > Showing: /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1 > See also: /usr/local/man/man1/gls.1 > > LS(1) General Commands Manual LS(1) > > NAME > ls - list directory contents > [...] > Actually, I would argue it's even more useful in that case: it makes it obvious the manpage SHOULD be patched to have the installed command have the right name. And in case we have the same command name in several places, it's fairly easy to get confused and run the wrong one. Case in point: cups. Where all the commands are name exactly the same as stuff in base, but nothing behaves identically. It's fairly easy to get confused and lose a bit of time reading the wrong manpage. Having any kind of small indication that there are several of them could be a life-saver for lots of people. As for section stuff and things: we all got bitten years ago looking for printf and checking the section at top to figure out it was a shell command. That case is fairly obvious because the syntax is entirely different. But those things, imo, are fairly non-intuitive, and if we can help people avoid looking up the wrong information, that would be cool. Possibly in a much shrinked manner so it takes as little screen space as possible. But just because we got used to it by making the same mistake until we learnt doesn't mean Unix has to be unfriendly for newcomers.
