Re: [PATCH] ld.1

["David O'Brien" <obrien at FreeBSD dot org>]

On Sun, Nov 26, 2000 at 12:13:00PM -0800, Nick Clifton wrote:
> : Also, does the complete _583_ line copyright really need to be
> : printed out when viewing the manpage???  For as.1, the content is
> : only _207_ lines.  Why isn't the copyright in the manpage as a
> : comment suffient?  This change really, really clutters up the man
> : pages, especially when wanting to view what is normally at the
> : bottom of the man page such as "SEE ALSO" sections, etc..
> 
> Not being a big 'man' user I so not know how problematic this is.

:-)  Well formatted and pleasing manpages are very important to FreeBSD.

> Can't you just ignore the extra text ?  Or filter it out ?

I guess I could comment it out when I import the manpages, but will
someone then come to me complaining I touched a copyright message and I
don't have the right to do so?

> I generally subscribe to the theory that it is better to provide too
> much information rather than too little, hence the inclusion of the
> full text.  How is this problem handled in other situations ?

All the FSF GNU binaries only print a subset of the copyright and license
message.  Gawk's is 15 lines long, gas and ld's 3 lines, GCC doesn't
print anything, 

-- 
-- David  (obrien@FreeBSD.org)