Comment 9 for bug 46480

On Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 11:31:35PM +0100, Michael Kerrisk wrote:
> >
> > apt-listchanges(1), bts(1), dhelp(1), dwww(1), fontforge(1), man(1),
> > mensis(1), querybts(1), sensible-browser(1), urlview(1), ...
>
> Are you saying that all of these tools observe the '%' specifiers
> that are documented in your proposed patch? Certainly some of the
> manual pages do not indicate that is so.

The patch says 'most' observe the extended format, while informing the
user contextually that some do not. Change it to 'many' if you disagree
on the proportion.

> (Interestingly, the man(1) is the only one of these
> that is present and documentes BROWSER on the SUSE 10 and
> RH ES 4.0 systems I just checked; RH has urlview(1), but the page
> there does not document BROWSER. I am guessing that many of the
> above pages are Debian-specific.)

Yes, many of them are. I filed a Debian bug after all. If you're
upstream, I'm not sure why this bug reached you because I didn't send it
to you.

> > environ(7)
>
> Actually environ(5) in upstream -- Debian has changed this for
> some reason unknown to me.

(5) is for documenting file formats according to FHS. A strict reading
of FHS would exclude it from (5), but I'm not sure anyone really cares
about that.

> > seems to be the conventional place for documenting specific
> > environment variables.
>
> *some* environment variables. To repeat, I looked at the
> brief list of environment variables that were said to be *common*
> in environ(5), and BROWSER is clearly not common.

How many applications must respect it in order to be considered
'common'? Very few applications launch an external browser, but of
those that do, most of them seem to respect BROWSER. Because many
applications do not launch external browsers, BROWSER is thus uncommon?

> > If this is simply an excuse for not having time to add the appropriate
> > documentation,
>
> You begin by stating that a change to the manual pages is
> "unacceptable", now you are making presumptions about my
> motivations. Neither of things has warmed me up to
> your argument.

I'm a busy person myself and I would prefer to present opposition to
work that I don't consider necessary, and that someone seems capable of
doing themselves, than to spent time doing that work. That is all I
meant. And I perceived that was the case because the original BROWSER
documentation was simply commented out rather than fixed according to
the user request.

Anyway, I'm not trying to 'warm you up' to convince you, because I
believe only facts are truly convincing. Nor am I going out of my way
to offend you... in any case I apologize if I have offended you.

Thanks,

--
Ryan Underwood, <email address hidden>