Hi, Alejandro Colomar wrote on Sun, Jun 19, 2022 at 04:11:49PM +0200: > On 6/19/22 16:00, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
>> On this out of date system, the *.gz man pages under >> /usr/share/man, so ignoring /usr/local/man, come from about >> 600 packages. Package man-pages is the biggest supplier of >> those at about 17% of the man-page files, but that still leaves >> quite a few others. > Interesing. Since you say it's interesting, here is another data point from an OpenBSD-current system used for development, i.e. with a medium range of packages installed, more development-related software than so-called "productivity" software: numbers of pages mdoc man base system = /usr/share/man/ 3457 945 window system = /usr/X11R6/man/ 17 1513 optional packages = /usr/local/man/ 378 4955 to compare, not installed: Lunix man pages project 0 1060 The number of optional packages i have installed is only a small fraction of the number of packages i could install if i wanted to, specifically, 504 from out of more than ten thousand, or roughly 5%. A very crude extrapolation suggests (basically, multiplying by 20) there might be about 5000 mdoc manual pages and about 100,000 man manual pages in software that has been ported to OpenBSD. Given that the base system corpora of FreeBSD and NetBSD are of the same order of magnitude as in OpenBSD (and treating DragonFly as a FreeBSD fork for now, which is not fair in general, but good enough for this particular purpose because Dragonfly is likely to evetually merge FreeBSD manual page improvements, even if with a long delay) the estamited total number of mdoc manual pages might be about 15k, with each of the major BSD systems contolling rougly 20-25% each, and third-party software controlling maybe on the order of 20-40%. To summarize, the *BSD base systems very likely collectively control the majority of existing mdoc(7) manual pages, whereas the Linux man pages project likely controls on the order of 1% of the existing man(7) pages - even when we consider neither commercial UNIX systems nor proprietary software. That makes compatibility in man(7) significantly more of a concern than in mdoc(7). All the same, i would certainly not consider adding anything as disruptive as .MR to mdoc(7). Yours, Ingo
