re-synchronize zfs man pages with illumos

[Matthew Ahrens]

Andriy, thanks for your continued efforts to improve OpenZFS on both
FreeBSD and illumos.  Anything we can do to ease porting changes both ways
will be great.

If you find things that could be improved in the illumos manpages, I'd be
happy to help you get those upstream too.  I'm not an expert in mandoc, but
if you think the FreeBSD style or content is better than what was done in
illumos, we should consider making changes in illumos too.

--matt

On Fri, Sep 8, 2017 at 3:07 PM, Andriy Gapon <avg at freebsd.org> wrote:

>
> Originally ZFS manual pages were written using a different formatting
> language
> from what we use in FreeBSD.  I am not very knowledgeable in this area,
> but the
> experts should recognize the language by things like \fB, \fR, etc.
>
> Martin Matuska (mm) converted the manuals to the FreeBSD mdoc in r228019
> https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=228019
>
> Recently illumos switched to using mdoc format as well.
> That happened gradually and the changes were usually mixed with other
> changes.
> For example, the zpool manual was converted in this change:
> https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=318936
> https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/commit/
> c8323d4323a565676ba44883bfeb289d9ed8813e
>
> It is not surprising, of course, that the illumos mdoc pages are quite
> different
> from their FreeBSD counterparts given the independent conversions.
>
> So, at the moment we have several classes of differences that are not easy
> to
> identify via textual differences of the source files alone.
>
> 1. Differences in the content due to underlying differences between
> illumos and
> FreeBSD, e.g. zones vs jails or different sample disk names, etc.
>
> 2. Whitespace differences where exactly the same words are split
> differently
> between the lines, etc.
>
> 3. Style differences.  For example, explicit parentheses vs Pq/Po/Pc; use
> of  Tn
> in FreeBSD; much more frequent use of Ns macro in illumos; quotes vs a
> different
> font (e.g. Qq vs Sy); etc.
>
> 4. Mistakes in either FreeBSD or illumos version.  For example, the FreeBSD
> versions often continue a line after a period.
>
> 5. Independent / diverging language corrections.
>
> My impression is that the illumos pages are cleaner than the FreeBSD ones
> at the
> moment. My inclination is to suggest that we "restart" our pages from the
> current illumos pages and "rebase" FreeBSD-specific changes on top of
> those.
>
> I realize that that would be a lot of work.  But the benefits are quite
> obvious
> as it would be much easier to merge changes both ways.
>
> Comments, suggestions, offers of help are all very welcome!
> Thanks.
> --
> Andriy Gapon
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