Andries E. Brouwer wrote: > > Hi Michael, > > At some point in time I cleaned up the messy and incomplete mount docs > and wrote the nicely structured and complete mount(8). Of course as > time passes completeness can be lost, and the page can become unwieldy > because of excessive length. The page I am looking at has roughly 1500 > lines, of which roughly 1000 are about filesystem-specific mount options. > Maybe a bit long, but since this length is caused by a list that is > alphabetically sorted and has entries that tend to be only a few dozen > lines long, I do not mind this length so much. > > Perhaps Peter complains about something else when he sees a mess? > No, but I really don't think it's appropriate to just tag on and on to a single man page. I know that I find it incredibly painful to wade through the long list of options, most of which don't apply to me. Lists within lists don't visually scan well. > The goal of a man page author must be convenience of the user. > The information must be clear, precise, concise, easy to find. > > I don't know how modern distributions usually present these man pages. > Myself, I read them in the old-fashioned way on an xterm, where no > hyperlinks are available. In such a setting a single page is clearly > more convenient, but there will come a point where it is simply too long. > > These filesystem man pages in section 4 do not exist yet, as far as I can see. > What would the names be? Would splitting things up make it easier for the > user to find her info? Some auxilliary filesystems already have section 4, I believe. The other option, of course, is to move that data to mount.<filesystem>(8). -hpa -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
