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Date: 09 Mar 2002 23:18:23 -0800
From: "Gary W. Swearingen" <swear@blarg.net>
Reply-To: swear@blarg.net
To: FreeBSD-gnats-submit@freebsd.org
Subject: man(1) program should not display (old) dates in footers.
X-GNATS-Notify:

>Number:         35727
>Category:       misc
>Synopsis:       man(1) program should not display (old) dates in footers.
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       non-critical
>Priority:       low
>Responsible:    freebsd-bugs
>State:          closed
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:  
>Class:          change-request
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Sat Mar 09 23:20:01 PST 2002
>Closed-Date:    Sat Jun 05 04:14:54 PDT 2004
>Last-Modified:  Sat Jun 05 04:14:54 PDT 2004
>Originator:     Gary W. Swearingen
>Release:        FreeBSD 4.5-STABLE i386
>Organization:
none
>Environment:
n/a
================
>Description:

The man(1) program apparently extracts the ".Dd" date from the page
source and displays it in the footer.  Sometimes (when .Dd is not
used?) the date in the footer is very recent, but very often, the date
in the footer is very ancient, giving the (usually!) false impression
to new ("potential old") users that the man pages are poorly maintained
and tending to encourage the perception that FreeBSD (and other BSD
OSes) are ancient and obsolecent.

Marketing considerations are important and good for FreeBSD, like it or
not.

I propose simply removing the dates from the footer.  The very few who
care what that "document date" is/was may look in the source.  Note that
many man pages rightfully put similar old dates in a "History" section.

Alternatively, and more work, some automated means to insert the man
page release date (or even the last modification date -- an actually
useful date) could be implemented.

I know this is a low probability change-request/wish, but it's long
bugged me and I thought I should put it "out there" for consideration.
================
>How-To-Repeat:
n/a
================
>Fix:
?
>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:

From: Dima Dorfman <dima@trit.org>
To: swear@blarg.net
Cc: FreeBSD-gnats-submit@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: misc/35727: man(1) program should not display (old) dates in footers. 
Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2002 08:47:32 +0000

 "Gary W. Swearingen" <swear@blarg.net> wrote:
 > The man(1) program apparently extracts the ".Dd" date from the page
 > source and displays it in the footer.  Sometimes (when .Dd is not
 > used?) the date in the footer is very recent, but very often, the date
 > in the footer is very ancient, giving the (usually!) false impression
 > to new ("potential old") users that the man pages are poorly maintained
 > and tending to encourage the perception that FreeBSD (and other BSD
 > OSes) are ancient and obsolecent.
 >
 > ...
 > 
 > Alternatively, and more work, some automated means to insert the man
 > page release date (or even the last modification date -- an actually
 > useful date) could be implemented.
 
 The date in .Dd is the time of the last major change (this is
 obviously subjective, but usually the adding of a new flag or option,
 among other, similar, things, justifies bumping the date) to the page
 (except when someone forgets to update it, but ru@ is pretty good
 about pouncing on those people).  This is a lot more useful than the
 last change date according to CVS--many changes are purly mechanical,
 and *that* might mislead someone to think the page is changing
 (significantly) when it isn't.  The reason you see many "ancient"
 dates is because some programs and interfaces simply haven't changed
 since the 4.4BSD days.  For example, I wouldn't want the date in the
 strlen(3) page to say 2001/10/01 (last modified time in CVS), since
 that creates the impression that something worthwhile changed.
 
 It might be worthwhile to document the meaning of these dates
 somewhere, but I don't want to see them removed.
State-Changed-From-To: open->closed 
State-Changed-By: schweikh 
State-Changed-When: Sat Jun 5 04:12:20 PDT 2004 
State-Changed-Why:  
All the places that look right for documenting what the date 
expresses (man(1), man(7)) are contribed src (GNU). I believe 
it is okay to just live with this not being explicitly documented. 
It's implicitly documented in this PR now :-) 

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=35727 
>Unformatted:
