>> (A) Make man pages' copyright and permission notices visible in the >> roff source file only, and put them in plain ASCII in comments. >> Stop defining macros for them. Author information, if present, >> can be directly inlined into the man page, not stuffed into a >> private macro to be popped later. > > FWIW, i'm strongly in favour of that option.
Me too. > I consider Copyright notices in the user interface, that is, in > manual pages, and even a bit worse in stdout or stderr of the > program, outright rude and disrespectful of the user [...] Well, I suggest we simply follow the GNU standards; the exact rules can be found in the `maintain.texi' info file. In case you don't have it on your system, you can get an up-to-date copy from http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/tree/doc/maintain.texi Section 6.5 `Copyright Notices' should cover all details. > I have always found it unfortunate that groff, which is used a lot > as a documentation formatter and does have some well-merited > authority in that area, is setting this horrible example that people > might follow. If people are going to improve this, fine :-) > In stdout and stderr, every unnecessary word is a very serious > nuisance, and two additional lines are hellish, they make stuff > scroll off the screen and bury the output i'm looking for in heaps > of crap. Please don't generalize too much. groff is a filter, so it doesn't produce any additional output to stdout at all. However, if you explicitly call `groff --version', I *expect* a copyright and license notice. Also note that your BSD point of view is probably different to what GNU and the FSF expect. > Don't worry about the exact format. Yep. However, having identical entries in all files makes gnulib's `update-copyright' script work better. Werner
