Re: [HACKERS] Re: [ANNOUNCE] New man pages

Thomas Lockhart wrote:
>> Oh, I get it. Can everyone handle multi-character man sections?
>
>That is how, for example, the X system does their man pages. There are
>sections "1x", etc. Except that now that I look on my RH linux system
>they are squirreled away in /usr/X11/man/man1/, etc so I must have
>seen that on another system. Perhaps my old Alpha boxes??

Pages from multi-character sections are stored in the directory for the
first character. For instance: /usr/man/man7/select.7l.gz

>> I would like to use existing sections, rather than do our own. I found
>> I had to modify the man page search to look in a manl, and others may
>> have the same problem.

For Debian, I have relocated the SQL pages to section 7l and commands such
as psql and createuser go in section 1. Policy requires me to use one of
the numbered sections (1-8), though I can use a suffix to ensure uniqueness.

On Debian GNU/Linux, the sections are:
1 User commands
2 System calls
3 Library routines
4 Devices
5 File formats
6 Games
7 Miscellaneous
8 System administration

...
>otoh, it does eliminate the possibility of man page pollution if we
>manage to have the same man page name as some other existing page.

As of course we do; for example, select is also in section 2.

>*That* would be a bad thing. And in general adding ~75 man pages to
>existing sections is a pretty big load...

I'm not sure that's much of a problem. These are the figures from my
system for /usr/man, /usr/share/man, /usr/X11R6/man and /usr/local/man
combined:

Section Count
1 2258
2 236
3 6554
4 39
5 236
6 26
7 128
8 517

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