Sender: rich AT phekda DOT freeserve DOT co DOT uk
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Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2003 18:50:26 +0000
From: Richard Dawe <rich AT phekda DOT freeserve DOT co DOT uk>
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To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: perl 5.8.0 from w2k test site problems
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Reply-To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com

Hello.

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 19 Jan 2003 lnobody AT delorie DOT com wrote:
> 
> > VitalModuleBar.3
> > VitalModuleBaz.3
> > 12345678.123
> > ->
> > VitalMod.3 for both.
> 
> Yes, but are those real-life examples?  How many Perl man pages actually
> clash like that?

Using the scheme above (collapsing ::) and just by looking at file and module
names:

ExtUtils::*
ExtUtils::*::*
File::Spec::*
Locale::*
Math::Big[FI]*
Memoize::[ES]*
Pod::Parse*
Test::Harness::*
Time::[Ll]ocal*
io::Socket::*

~20, I think.

> In general, man pages whose file names exceed 8+3 limits are nothing new;
> that's why I made `man' support truncated file names.  The relly
> important question is: how many conflicts do we have to resolve in a
> given package.  In Groff, I had maybe 3 such clashes, so I renamed the
> clashing pages to something close.

The problem then is that the users have to know about the mappings.
<IDEALISM>Really it should just work out-of-the-box.</IDEALISM>

I'm starting to think a map file would be the best solution. The scheme I
proposed of mapping '::' is a too Perl-man-page-specific.

Each package could have its own map file, perhaps under man/map<n>. 'man
ExtUtils::MM_Win95' would be looked up normally. Once that fails man would go
through man/map<n> in the order it normally does for <n>, loading the map file
and looking for matches. Then we can store the man pages in whichever format
is convenient - collapsing :: or :: -> slashes - whatever.

Bye, Rich =]

-- 
Richard Dawe [ http://www.phekda.freeserve.co.uk/richdawe/ ]