jjones@cs.uiuc.edu (Joel Jones) (01/11/91)
This brings to mind an interesting idea that I have had for a long time. Many
of us, no doubt, have been called upon to program more than one flavor of Unix
at one time or another. Wouldn't it be nice if there was _one_ set of manuals
that could be used for all major variants? What I have in mind would be man
pages that would have marked with sidebars the areas in which the semantics
and syntax of the command varied from one version to another. Such a set of
manuals would be particularly useful for consultants. What do others think?
Is this something a major publisher would want to publish? Part of the problem
also would be that some vendors might consider use of the information in their
manuals as a derived work and subject to their copyright.
Joel Jones
jjones@uiuc.edu
--
Joel Jones As the advertisment for an exhibition on Leonardo da Vinci said,
jjones@uiuc.edu "They called him a genius, a botanist, a demon, a philosopher, a
practical joker, an eccentric, and a visionary. No wonder he
was such a great engineer."prs@tcsc3b2.tcsc.com (Paul Stath) (01/11/91)
Although I don't see a copyright in the front of my System V AT&T manual, I believe that most companies would consider this a part of their derived works, and subject to copyright. But, while we are dreaming about a "universal" man system, how about putting all of the sources into an SCCS (RCS) file, and allowing the user to select/extract the system that they are working on. Something like this: (orig. `ls' man page) | | x (BSD) __/ \__ (SystemV)---\ / \ / \ \ (4.2) (4.3) (3.1) (3.2) (4.0) (and so on, and so on, and so on.) Depending on how far down the line you are, you would probably extract the correct man pages for your system, as this would be faster than rebuilding the man page from SCCS (RCS) each time you wanted to look at it.
tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) (01/12/91)
If you have a man program that understands MANPATHs, then you can pretty
easily maintain multiple sets of man pages on the same machine. Just keep
each set in a separately-named but conveniently-accessible directory.
Then you can get a them with something close to:
man ls # standard version
man -M /usr/man/tahoe ls
man -M /usr/man/sysVr3.1 ls
man -M /usr/man/sun ls
I've got my system set up that way, and I find it pretty convenient.
They're not all available in the same print-out, but think that's ok.
Now, I've also got things set so you can tell which tree the man page come
from at a glance (path as displayed by pager, as well as headers that
boldly state which set it's from using per-tree -man [nt]roff macros) and
so you can get at a tree more easily from the command line, such as with
`man tahoe ls', for example. While not all man programs give you quite
all this fluff :-), as long as you have one that groks a MANPATH, you
should be able to do much of this.
--tom
--
"Hey, did you hear Stallman has replaced /vmunix with /vmunix.el? Now
he can finally have the whole O/S built-in to his editor like he
always wanted!" --me (Tom Christiansen <tchrist@convex.com>)alex@am.sublink.org (Alex Martelli) (01/12/91)
jjones@cs.uiuc.edu (Joel Jones) writes:
...
:at one time or another. Wouldn't it be nice if there was _one_ set of manuals
:that could be used for all major variants? What I have in mind would be man
:pages that would have marked with sidebars the areas in which the semantics
I WOULD give an eye and a tooth for this, and I'm NOT joking. Such
a manual would easily be worth upwards of a thousand dollars to us,
just for parts 2 and 3; even more if complete. We must support more
than 10 different platforms...!
--
Alex Martelli - (home snailmail:) v. Barontini 27, 40138 Bologna, ITALIA
Email: (work:) staff@cadlab.sublink.org, (home:) alex@am.sublink.org
Phone: (work:) ++39 (51) 371099, (home:) ++39 (51) 250434;
Fax: ++39 (51) 366964 (work only), Fidonet: 332/401.3 (home only).martin@mwtech.UUCP (Martin Weitzel) (01/15/91)
In article <1991Jan12.120532.455@am.sublink.org> alex@am.sublink.org (Alex Martelli) writes: >jjones@cs.uiuc.edu (Joel Jones) writes: > ... >:at one time or another. Wouldn't it be nice if there was _one_ set of manuals >:that could be used for all major variants? What I have in mind would be man >:pages that would have marked with sidebars the areas in which the semantics > >I WOULD give an eye and a tooth for this, and I'm NOT joking. Such >a manual would easily be worth upwards of a thousand dollars to us, >just for parts 2 and 3; even more if complete. We must support more >than 10 different platforms...! Well, maybe not exactly what you are looking for, because it is a little out-of-date these days, but some years ago the following book was quite valuable to me: Portable C and UNIX System Programming J.E. Lappin Rabbit Software Prentice Hall ISBN 0-13-686494-5 At the time when this book appeared (1987), UNIX was still more diverging than today (SysV R4 which seems to unify UNIX/XENIX/BSD was not even thought about). There were several guides which tried to compare different commands and options of all the flavours of *IX, but non was really satisfactory, as it isn't sufficient to know that there ARE different options, when you need more detailed explanations. The above mentioned book did an `in-depth'-comparision of the major *IX variants that were available at this time. I found it valuable to see what dark corners should be avoided to ease the process of porting software. I'd much appreciate to hear that there's something like an update or a second edition of this book, including more recent variants. (The most recent in this book are SysV R2, Microsoft XENIX 5.0 and BSD 4.3.) Finally an interesting remark about the "author" of this book (taken from the back-cover text): "J.E. Lapin does not exist as an individual. The name represents the many individuals at Rabbit [Software Corporation] who were involved in the research and creation of the information contained herein." -- Martin Weitzel, email: martin@mwtech.UUCP, voice: 49-(0)6151-6 56 83
ralfi@pemstgt.PEM-Stuttgart.de (Ralf Holighaus) (01/16/91)
ralfi@pemstgt.PEM-Stuttgart.de (Ralf Holighaus) writes: >jjones@cs.uiuc.edu (Joel Jones) writes: >>This brings to mind an interesting idea that I have had for a long time. Many >>of us, no doubt, have been called upon to program more than one flavor of Unix >>at one time or another. Wouldn't it be nice if there was _one_ set of manuals >>that could be used for all major variants? What I have in mind would be man >>pages that would have marked with sidebars the areas in which the semantics >>and syntax of the command varied from one version to another. Such a set of >>manuals would be particularly useful for consultants. What do others think? >>Is this something a major publisher would want to publish? Part of the problem >>also would be that some vendors might consider use of the information in their >>manuals as a derived work and subject to their copyright. >> Joel Jones >> jjones@uiuc.edu >Great idea! I'd appreciate someone doing that quit exhausting job! >And: I think it would be a way to earn good money for almost everybody >busy with different UNIX systems would be a potential customer... > Ralf U. Holighaus > ralfi@pemstgt.PEM-Stuttgart.de This is now the _correct_ version (I set the LANG variable to german the last time, so the whole news was full of garbage...) Ralf. -- PEM Programmentwicklungsgesellschaft | Ralf U. Holighaus fuer Microcomputer mbH | Technical Support PO-Box 810165 D-7000 Stuttgart 80 Germany | holighaus@pemstgt.PEM-Stuttgart.de VOICE: x49-711-713045 FAX: x49-711-713047 | ..!unido!pemstgt!ralfi
seeger@thedon.cis.ufl.edu (F. L. Charles Seeger III) (01/17/91)
In article <1048@mwtech.UUCP> martin@mwtech.UUCP (Martin Weitzel) writes: | Portable C and UNIX System Programming | J.E. Lappin | Rabbit Software | Prentice Hall | ISBN 0-13-686494-5 ... | Finally an interesting remark about the "author" of this book (taken | from the back-cover text): "J.E. Lapin does not exist as an individual. | The name represents the many individuals at Rabbit [Software Corporation] | who were involved in the research and creation of the information | contained herein." Going even further, "je lapin" means "I rabbit" in French. (Or does everyone know that already?) -- Charles Seeger E301 CSE Building Office: +1 904 392 1508 CIS Department University of Florida Fax: +1 904 392 1220 seeger@ufl.edu Gainesville, FL 32611-2024