Review: fail(9) style/grammar (was Re: svn commit: r192908 ...)

[Benjamin Kaduk]

On Wed, 27 May 2009, Zachary Loafman wrote:

> On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 10:05:44AM -0700, Ben Kaduk wrote:
>> Our man page style says that new sentences should start on new lines.
>> (Since the '.' character is used for defining macros, and sometimes
>> the processor can get confused.)
>
> Ben -
>
> Thanks for the pedantry! I've attached a patch that should address your
> issues. (Doug, please review as mentor when you get a chance.)

Thanks!

>
> This is my first man page, so I apologize for the style violations. I
> fixed all the new sentence instances I could find, but I left the "e.g."
> and "i.e." instances untouched. That seems like it would suffer from the
> same issue, but I left them alone for now.
>
> Is there a style(9) equivalent for man pages? I hunted for a bit, but
> "man -k style" returned only style(9) and style.Makefile(9).

I think that probably the closest thing would be groff_mdoc(9), but
that's not exactly a style guide ... I think most of it ends up
just being picked up gradually, so don't feel too bad about missing
a few things here and there.

Things are a bit hazy in my memory, but I think that the new
sentence-->new line may also relate to having two spaces
between sentences -- I think that (e.g.) "e.g." should be okay.

The patch in your later message looks good.

Thanks!

-Ben Kaduk