Hi Michael, On 12/11/22 20:05, Michael Haardt wrote:
I just checked what is easily available to me: > v7 calls them sections in intro pages, but chapters in man(1) and man(7). Celerity Computing UNIX (looks like a BSD port) calls them sections in intro pages and man(7), but chapter in manv(7) (dtroff version of man(7)). SunOS 4.1.1 calls them sections everywhere. HP-UX 11.11 calls them sections everywhere.
Thanks for checking!
Given the changes it looks like you are not the first person to note an inconsistency here, but I see a majority calling them sections and getting rid of the term chapter over time.
It seems like a regression to me. The old term was, at least in terms of ambiguity, better.
Do we need to fix a decades-old regression in the manual pages? Well, _need_ is a strong word for that.
Now all of the above is commercially obsolete by now and Linux dominates, but I don't see a good reason to break an established term and instead suggest to follow the above and s/chapter/section/g.
Admittedly, it's hard to defend my proposal as _necessary_. Especially after the world has lived for decades with the ambiguity of having chapters as sections and sections also as... sections.
I have several times had to come up with imaginative ways to disambiguate the term section. Am I a corner case that has to live with that ambiguity way more than the average programmer? Quite likely.
Since I'll some day (likely for 6.02, that's 2 years from now) be publishing the Linux man-pages as a single-volume PDF, the term chapter will regain significance.
IMO, there's undoubtedly a reason to fix the regression, and reform the old term. However, the reason is not very strong, so it all depends on reaching an agreement with all of man-db, mandoc(1), and groff(1). That would probably have the side-effect that we also have agreement with OpenBSD. That would be a large subset of the relevant parties.
Cheers, Alex -- <http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
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