Subject: Re: man pages: option ordering
To: Frederick Bruckman <fredb@immanent.net>
From: Thomas Klausner <wiz@danbala.ifoer.tuwien.ac.at>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 01/06/2002 20:22:12
On Sun, Jan 06, 2002 at 01:02:46PM -0600, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
> A lot of man pages put their options in a logical order. "pax", for
> example, list the principle options '-r' and '-w' first. Alphabetizing
> all the man page options will *not* make the man page any easier to
> read, but it would certainly increase the effort required to import an
> updated version. It's not as if the author of the man page were
> unaware that "a" comes before "b" and so on, so he's not likely to
> change it just because you ask him to.

I do see that the -r, -w, and -a options to pax are somewhat special
and could be specified earlier.  I have no problem with that, and my
question is not geared in the direction of random noise commits that
want to increase diffs with any external distributions, so please try
to read it that way.

Just take a look at the flags e.g. after -r in pax(1):
	[-cdiknuvzADOYZ]
Why should the ordering of those be different in each man page?
I think consistency helps avoiding confusion, and I just want to find
an ordering we can more or less agree upon before doing the changes.

Bye,
 Thomas

-- 
Thomas Klausner - wiz@danbala.tuwien.ac.at
When all other means of communication fail, try words.