Subj : Re: about to blow a gaske To : Deuce From : Grymmjack Date : Fri May 27 2005 08:36 pm > > the new docs? i find that often much of what you read about is incorrect > > absent in man pages. of course this is much less heinous than not telling > > about things at all. > Generally, the documentation authours get reimbursed by the company they wor > for. As for Redhat specifically, afaik, the onus is on the copyright holder > contact Redhat and get the manpage out of the distro (I seem to recall a few > instances of jsut that) ok.. > 1) Eddie needs the functionality of the NIS subsystem. 2) Eddie is > used to Solaris, so he references the manpage and uses a Solaris box > to test against. 3) Eddie gets everything working (hooray!) 4) Eddie > swipes the Solaris man page, modifies it as required for his > implementation, and includes it with his pacakge. 5) Redhat sees a > complete NIS pacakge and adds it to their distro. that is not right still though think of it.. you made some great program, and 'butthead a' rips it and changes a few lines and then 'butthead company' with no tie to 'butthead a' except they use his rip of your code in their own program is now not legally accountable for theft? the inclusion of a middle-man as it were makes butthead company safe? that is ridiculous. > So, it turns out that Eddie is the one who broke copyright. Redhat is not > responsible for tracking down any possible copyright violations in every > package they include, that's up to the original authour. how preposterous. what if eddie worked for redhat? > And, in my opinion, incorrect manpages are MUCH MORE heinous that missing on > You try to read a manpage and it's not there, you go somewherer else for the > information. You read the manpage, frob about based on the information ther > get completely messed up, THEN go somewhere else for the information... know > now that you can't trust the documentation. It makes reading manpages an ut > waste of time. mostly man pages are pretty good. and current, but some of the stuff is just wrong at times. take the good with the bad since it's all free.. we cannot expect perfection all the time. > This is actually one of my biggest problems with Linux. it's gotten alot better. the ldp is to blame for the improvement :) - grymmjack .