Re: man 5 passwd fix

[Sven Ingebrigt Ulland <SvenI_(_dot_)_Ulland_(_at_)_iu_(_dot_)_hio_(_dot_)_no>]

On Tue, Aug 02, 2005 at 01:05:41PM -0400, Will H. Backman wrote:
> > > I'm not sure how to fix it, but...
> > > Looking at "man 5 passwd", each field is bold in the narrative
> > > description except for the paragraph that explains the home_dir.
> > 
> > which bit exactly do you think should be marked up, and why? i don't
> > see what you mean...
> > 
> 
> There are paragraphs that describe the list of fields, such as:
> [cut]
> The GECOS field normally contains...
> The users home directory is the full...
> The SHELL field is the command interpreter the...
>
> [cut]
> This is not a real problem, but I thought it
> might help the usability of the man page. 

I certainly agree, and I think the general issue is quite interesting:
Things like these aren't very essential to the OS (compared to big
advances in hardware support, for example), but I believe they matter
quite a bit, especially for people just starting with OpenBSD. I am
one of them myself, and have been for only a few weeks. If I had
written them down, I could point to quite a few other similar issues
in the documentation (man pages, FAQs, etc), but after a while your
mind develops workarounds, and you forget about it.

What, then, is the proper way of fixing small problems with
documentation, etc? At least for me, I find it difficult to make a
fuzz about things like these, because of their relatively unimportant
nature. A wiki-like system comes to mind, but as a disclaimer, I
haven't given that idea nay thought at all.

regards
sven