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Date: Tue, 02 Jan 2001 11:50:25 -0500
To: Tim Van Holder <tim DOT van DOT holder AT pandora DOT be>
From: "Peter J. Farley III" <pjfarley AT banet DOT net>
Subject: Re: Two glitches for autoconf 2.49b
Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>, djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
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 <9003-Mon01Jan2001185653+0200-eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
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At 10:01 AM 1/2/01 +0100, Tim Van Holder wrote:
<Snipped>
 >>> I'd suggest that man changes '::' in a man page to a '/', so
 >>> the man pages can be in subdirs (eg man/cat3/Foo/Bar.3).
 >
 >> I don't think `man' should dictate to the ported Perl how to rename
 >> these files in the DJGPP port.
 >No, of course not - but it would be nice if man translated '::' to
 >whatever alternative the ported perl uses.
 >I have my reservations about using '__' instead of '::' though; few
 >packages have a name with less than three letters. This would give
 >Foo__xxxxxxxxx.1, where the xxxx would only have three significant
 >letters in an 8.3 system. Not a lot.
 >A quick check in /usr/man/man3 on my RH6.2 box shows a few dozen 
names
 >that would cause trouble (a few examples: anything from Digest,
 >ExtUtils
 >or Getopt, as the name + __ is already 8 or longer, Pod::Parser and
 >Pod::ParseUtils, and several more).
 >IIRC perl uses a perl script to manufacture and install these man
 >pages,
 >so I think it should not be that hard to use subdirs if on DOS. 
Peter?

It would not be hard to change the name to use directories (in fact, 
that part is trivial), but the name would then have to be parsed to 
find out what new directories to create and to create them before 
writing the man file.  Not real hard in perl, but currently not 
implemented as part of the pod-to-man creation process.  Someone would 
have to write or incorporate existing perl code from elsewhere to 
accomplish that task.

I realize that seems like it is worth doing, but there are many 
features of the perl build and environment that are not 8.3 
safe.  *None* of the work I did while participating in p5p on the new 
releases was done in a plain DOS environment, *only* in LFN=y DOS 
boxes.  I'm not real sure it *can* be made completely 8.3 safe without 
major surgery that I'm also not real sure the p5p folk would go along 
with.

In summary, it may well be that there will *never* be an 8.3-safe build 
available for perl on DJGPP.  In which case, the "::" ==> "__" choice I 
made is the simplest solution (though changing it to a single "_" would 
probably be accepted without any complaints).

Eli, would it be too intrusive to add a "special case" to the man clone 
to check for "::" in the requested page name and automagically convert 
it to "__"?  Maybe only if the file open fails, so as not to interrupt 
normal operation?

HTH

---------------------------------------------------------
Peter J. Farley III (pjfarley AT dorsai DOT org OR
                      pjfarley AT banet DOT net)