freebsd
man(1) clarify searching + minor nits
Attempt to clarify search while maintaining terseness. Inspired by conversations on community discord!
Unresolved:
- I'm having trouble understanding example 3, it doesn't find anything on my sparse but inhabited boxen.
- logic preventing incompatible flags from being used together (e.g.
man -Kk, seems to start around line 600) is not working on CURRENT. I tried playing with it but I don't understand it enough yet.
Cc @tetlowgm
I think these changes should be sensible and non-controversial, but perhaps controversially I'd love to:
- Use A a B b sorting like other manuals
- s/online/local/. Online is traditional language since ancient times, and I feel tenderly about that, but I'm concerned that nobody who didn't already know knows what that means.
this may need other changes, but can we not change whitespace on the man pages.
I think this would be a major positive feature for 14.2. This is the introduction to manual pages, and the current explanations for the search features are only useful for people who already know what they mean.
Last push removes prompts from examples for triple click copy/paste. Subsequent pushes just tweaking commit message.
~~Jose told me he will not approve this or withdraw his objection now that everything he complained about was either his mistake reviewing or resolved. He said he was "commenting" and not "reviewing". Therefore, if it's okay, I don't want his name on the reviewed by trailer for this commit. We have a precedent of doing this already.~~
From a sincere place of caring, and with respect and reverence, I would like to humbly ask the masters to consider that this bikeshed is, in fact, 15% better than what I originally proposed. However, I had a watertight, painted bikeshed ready before the code slush, and now new users will be piling their bikes in the rain until June 2025, and complaining to me about it, and that hurts my feelings.
You guys taught me everything, I am not going anywhere, but I am hurt. This negatively impacts me as the Manual Pages Mentor on the community discord. This negatively effects the perception of BSD doc culture when I am busy working, and new users ask how manual page search works (because emulates $unixtool is not an explanation), and someone else answers incorrectly before I have time to take care of it.
This is about showing new users that structured, carefully considered information written by competent passionate people is more accessible than asking chatgpt to hallucinate disinformation at the cost of 2.9 WH per query.
@concussious commented: Jose told me he will not approve this or withdraw his objection now that everything he complained about was either his mistake reviewing or resolved. He said he was "commenting" and not "reviewing". Therefore, if it's okay, I don't want his name on the reviewed by trailer for this commit. We have a precedent of doing this already.
For completeness, I agree with the proposed changes, the way they are at this point in time, therefore "withdrawing" my objections. However, the rest of the statement above still holds true.
