Mail Archives: cygwin/2004/07/15/22:01:17
On 15 Jul, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > Incidentally is it appropriate to include Cygwin-port-specific
> > information in a man page?
>
> Well, from a user perspective it might be cool, but IMHO the original
> man page shouldn't be changed, unless it's a change which should be
> send upstream anyway. We have the Cygwin specific documentation in
> /usr/share/doc/Cygwin (resp. /usr/doc/Cygwin in earlier releases) for
> a long time now. It should be not too hard to ask users to look there
> for Cygwin specific docs.
>
>
> Corinna
Can you think of a way of incorporating the material in the man page
that would be palatable upstream? How do you think people would feel
about a section "PORTABILITY" or "NOTES" or even "WINDOWS" or "CYGWIN"?
The above question is relevant to a patch for the ssmtp man page. If
ssmtp uses ssmtp-config on most platforms it works on, then I can just
write a patch that includes both fixes.
If not, I can just fix one thing: the mention of /usr/lib/sendmail
instead of /usr/sbin/sendmail. (I'm told that the latter is the
standard location to find sendmail, these days).
This is a usability issue. It's hard enough to teach people to type:
man <command-name>
teaching them to type:
more /usr/share/doc/Cygwin/ssmtp-0.x.y/README.ssmtp-0.x.y
is even less likely. (With the consequence that users pester developers
with questions, developers get irritated, users get annoyed, and the
developers efforts don't get used.)
luke
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