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Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2004 12:01:03 +1000 (EST)
From: luke DOT kendall AT cisra DOT canon DOT com DOT au
Subject: ssmtp man page (Was: Re: sending email from Cygwin)
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
In-Reply-To: <20040715081800.GC19753@cygbert.vinschen.de>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/plain; CHARSET=US-ASCII
Message-Id: <20040716020103.B6B8584C87@pessard.research.canon.com.au>

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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