[busybox-dev] AST versions of fold, mktemp, pathchk,& tty [PSARC/2009/414 FastTrack timeout 07/31/2009]

[Roland Mainz]

Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> > Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> >> Personally, I think --man, --html and --nroff and such is a dangerous
> >> precedent to set.  I'd rather not have them, and instead rely on the
> >> "man" command to provide this functionality.
> >
> > Isn't it a bit late to raise such a concern, since the precedent was set
> > in the long list of previous cases that used AST/ksh93 implementations?
> 
> It might be.  I certainly should have raised the issue back then.  I'm
> still not happy about this.

Why ?

> There's yet another concern, which is that I've found that man <command>
> and command --man do not generate the same document.  So we know
> introduce a problem were documentation delivered on the system can be
> inconsistent.

Erm... no. As said in my other email the "--man" output is basically a
short/terse format and more or less exactly what the "getopts" parser
sees (it may even be usefull if main documentation and actual code are
out-of-sync (which is currently the case for many commands)).

> I feel really strongly that this was a bad idea.

IMO it was a nice idea - see my other email where this feature
originated from.

> Strongly enough that
> I'm contemplating derailing the case.

And what should we do then ? The only thing we can do is to remove it
from the case materials - removing it from the code can only be done
globally (e.g. libast) and that really will break existing&&ARC'ed
parts.

[snip]
> > No matter what you multiply $0 by, it's still $0.   (We don't localize man
> > pages in Solaris.   A subset of man pages used to be translated to Japanese,
> > but I believe even that is no longer done.)
> 
> Really?  That comes as a surprise.  But we *do* localize commands.

Actually the situation is AFAIK currently that there is not really much
funding for this left and the basic system commands are very low
priority. That's why I am currently working on getting a rag-tag team
set-up to get l10n catalogs for the AST commands (e.g. covering ksh93
itself and all commands which go through the busybox-like "alias"
wrapper (including those commands covered by this ARC case)) integrated
(first covering Japanese, Chinese, French and later German, Spanish,
Russian, Urkainian locales).

> So
> does putting --man content in the command suddenly mean that in order to
> be I18N compliant they have to be localized?  That would certainly add
> to the cost.

I don't understand the connection here:
1. "i18n" is "internationalisation", e.g. the support for non-ASCII
characters&co. and this is fully covered by the new commands (and I am
_very_ picky about this detail).
2. "l10n" means "localistion" and mainly rotates around error
strings/messages/etc. being provided in non-english languages. 

----

Bye,
Roland

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