thomson@uthub.UUCP (07/16/87)
>I don't make Sun policy on this matter; >I don't make Sun policy on *most* matters. I resent the fact that >Brian somehow seemed to consider a complaint about Sun's policy on >this to somehow be an appropriate response to my comment. My apologies. Of course, I realize Guy doesn't make policy. And, although my original needle was inspired by his comment, I did not have any misconception that I was continuing the same discussion. >The point *I* was making was that UNIX source is not something that >every UNIX user has available; at this point, it may be that *most* >UNIX users don't have it. Some consider this a Bad Thing; I don't, I wasn't talking about program sources, I was talking about documentation sources. Sun does distribute sources for man pages, my question is why not also do it for manuals, or at least for those that Berkeley supplies (I will concede there may be great pressures to control the sources for manuals written at Sun). It is incorrect to claim that this is not permitted in a binary distribution; the binary distribution tape for our Integrated Solutions machine does contain all of /usr/doc (even the ones they've changed). >The claim that you don't have documentation if you don't have it in a >machine-readable form is, when taken as a general claim, absurd. >There are users who could use, or who need, the machine-readable >documentation. There are others who have little use for it; they >don't have the time to spend learning how to produce that >documentation, modifying it, or printing it. But, since they don't need a source licence to get it, the worst that will happen if you offer it to them is that you will waste a moderate amount of cassette tape. Personally, I work at terminals in several locations and I do appreciate the ability to bring the documentation to me (with nroff) rather than having to hunt up a paper version. My complaint might also be less valid if Sun gave paper copies of all the Berkeley stuff. The episode that engendered my consternation was when a Sun-user asked me if I knew of a document that describes how to write a network interface driver. Berkeley supplies it in /usr/doc; Sun does not supply it in any form. -- Brian Thomson, CSRI Univ. of Toronto utcsri!uthub!thomson, thomson@hub.toronto.edu