| > | > Personally, I think this proposal is unnecessarily morbid.  Reminding
| > | > users of death each time they read the documentation doesn't seem
| > | > good.
| > actually I sort of agree with this more, the authors name should be
| > there anyway but not the rest . . . it just seems creepy.
| 
| Or should it.  Thinking long term, all of us will be dead.   NetBSD will
| still be around, and hopefully it is useful enough that it is updated from
| time to time.  (Short of end of the world)

then maybe someplace within the system's core documentation but
not a manual page :D 

I would be kind of bummed out if that were in any of my own original
man pages with some of my software.

| Ping will be updated from time to time.   Eventially the authors section
| will become large and pointless.   
| 
| Remember this is a man page.  Let us consider why you would read the
| authors section of a man page.  I can think of two reasons, first you want
| to know the answer to the "Trivial Prusuit" question who is the orginal
| author of ping; the other is you have read the man page and/or the source
| code, and want to ask a question of someone who should know.  Mailing
| lists might or might not be the better solution to the latter problem.
... 
| Something.   The advantage of cheap storage is we can save useless stuff
| for future historians who will be interested in God only knows.  We should
| do what we can to help them though.  (of course without destroying
| something useful, but that isn't at issue here as there is still the old
| version of all man pages in CVS)

there is a resounding note here that i want to call to everyone's
attention. there are a lot of users always querying about "this historical
BSD aspect and that Unix history bit" - this came up at least 3 times 
on a variety of lists over the last 4 or 5 months.

I think a pattern is definitely forming and netbsd is the right entity
to take charge of it, i also think we should keep kicking this around
and see if we can come up with a reasonable way to make this sort of
information available. lets all sit back think about this and see if
we can come up with any ideas, I have some right now that Hubert sort
of inspired on a thread he and I have (totally unrelated to this - of
course!):

- a pkg of some sort
- my aformentioned web pages idea
- a combination of the above 2

Now, the Guide has the history details down, we (I mean all of us) are
grappling with ways to get the guide easily intergrated into the pkgsrc
system. So that covers the basics of BSD history, if anyone wants to make
it more detailed they should contact Federico or netbsd-docs list.

As for dedications, I propse we make them in some (TBD) format that can be
added to pkgsrc and is also available at the netbsd web server.

I feel both of these are important for 2 reasons, one, we would be ahead
of our time with information like this and 2 it would stem off a lot of
queries that, as our userbase grows, will obviously increase. And everyone
agrees if we wast 10k in documentation to repel 11k of emails then we
have accomplished something :)

If this all sounds good sound out and I will work on a detailed email
to send by netbsd-doc. 

	thx gang,
			jrf



-- 
Jason R. Fink <jrf@diverge.org> http://www.diverge.org/