svn commit: r363178 - head/contrib/mandoc

[John Baldwin]

On 7/15/20 11:24 AM, Ed Maste wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Jul 2020 at 14:11, Rodney W. Grimes
> <freebsd at gndrsh.dnsmgr.net> wrote:
>>
>> The only thing that was added, and herein reverted was incorrect
>> information that apropos and makewhatis first appeared in FreeBSD 11,
>> conflicting the much richer HISTORY already present in this manual page.
> 
> It seems that including history as it relates to FreeBSD would be a
> suitable addition to this section. Just "This version of the .Nm
> utility..." instead of "The .Nm utility" would be fine?

I agree that the existing history does read more like an OpenBSD manpage
than a FreeBSD one.  I'm not sure the original commit quite did it justice
though in fixing it.

For example from apropos(1):

     Part of the functionality of whatis was already provided by the former
     manwhere utility in 1BSD.  The apropos and whatis utilities first
     appeared in 2BSD.  They were rewritten from scratch for OpenBSD 5.6.

This last sentence is a bit out of place to read on FreeBSD.

The next paragraph is arguably worse in that regard:

     The -M option and the MANPATH variable first appeared in 4.3BSD; -m in
     4.3BSD-Reno; -C in 4.4BSD-Lite1; and -S and -s in OpenBSD 4.5 for apropos
     and in OpenBSD 5.6 for whatis.  The options -acfhIKklOTWw appeared in
     OpenBSD 5.7.

(how does a FreeBSD user know what FreeBSD versions those resolve to?)

I've thought about a few options; perhaps the least terrible is a
separate section mapping which OpenBSD versions were imported to which
FreeBSD versions, e.g. close to your suggestion of something like:

     The version of this utility from OpenBSD 5.7 was imported into
     FreeBSD 11.1.

And append new major versions that have corresponding OpenBSD history
in the future (is 5.7 even the right value for 11.1, if not then perhaps
this will have to have separate entries for 11.1 and whenever 5.7 was
imported, etc.)

-- 
John Baldwin