Re: [PATCH 00/31]: revise man pages

Benno Schulenberg <[email protected]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 12:45:15 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.editors.nano.devel
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Hello Branden,

Op 24-04-2026 om 00:53 schreef G. Branden Robinson:
> I have some revisions to propose to nano's man pages.

Ooofff!  That's almost two megabytes of email that are of
no interest to the average subscriber of this mailing list.
:/  A tarball on Savannah would have been a better choice.


> My objectives were to make the man pages more idiomatic as I understand
> historical and contemporary composition practices,

With "idiomatic" you mean "conforming to a certain style"?
If so, what style is that?  The style of other man pages?


> to exercise groff
> man(7) features I believe to be of value to composers and human readers
> of man pages,

Used features should be in a release of groff that is at least
five years old.  I've already seen the use of .MR (in patch 30)
which doesn't work on my machine -- groff-1.22.4.


> and to improve consistency among the documents internally
> and with nano's Texinfo manual.

Most textual differences between the man pages and the info manual
are on purpose.  When the same wording is used in both, it is just
out of laziness.  Wording things in a different way increases the
chances that a reader (of both texts) gets the precise meaning.


> Attachments:
> 
> 1.  a PDF of nano's man pages for U.S. letter paper
> 2.  a PDF of nano's man pages for A4 paper
> 3.  a gzipped tar archive of the documents after each patch,

Ouch.  No one asked for those.  That's a whole megabyte of
unsolicited email.  :/


> I welcome feedback and commentary.

I will work through the patches one by one, as I find the time.
Please don't answer those replies until I've finished.


Benno

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