Re: CVS commit: src/lib/libpthread

[Jukka Ruohonen <jruohonen%iki.fi@localhost>]

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 07:35:37PM +0200, Matthias Drochner wrote:
> Also, the xrefs are not sorted strictly alphabetically but
> in some logical order which is good imo.

The Xrefs are generally a symptom of the manual page format. As D. Holland
well said, the "man -k is so 1980s".

In my opinion we could have more introductory sections that connect the
pages in a more logical manner.[1] Just listing the manual pages in the
intro-sections is not enough.

For example, I think memoryallocators(9) and atomic_ops(3) are good
examples. The latter highlights also nicely and briefly the rationale, which
is often entirely missing in the man-pages. (Often the question particularly
in the kernel is: why? Not how.)

So in the long run we could have e.g. libc(3) or kernel(9).

Another option could be a book-like index, which I already mentioned on
docs@.

- Jukka.

[1] It would be interesting to use e.g. Graphviz to see what kind of a
    spider web the Xrefs really are.