Re: SEE ALSO fails

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2021 at 07:12:37PM -0400, Steve Izma wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 30, 2021 at 07:53:13PM +0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> > Subject: Re: SEE ALSO fails
> > 
> > James K. Lowden wrote on Sat, Oct 30, 2021 at 12:08:03PM -0400:
> > 
> > > A longstanding complaint of mine regarding Linux man pages is
> > > that they frequently have broken SEE ALSO references.  I
> > > wonder if there's not something the groff project could do to
> > > encourage packaging systems to avoid such errors.  
> > 
> > I think the basic idea expressed here is a terrible one, and we should
> > better not even consider how to implement it.
> 
> This is an extremely unimaginative response. The whole point of
> computers is to solve problems, not to perpetuate them.
> 
> On systems with package managers (which should be all operating
> systems), there already exists a database of packages that are
> installed. If the documentation system is sufficiently modular,
> that surely an optional utility could be added to the pipeline
> that produces manual pages that simply reports the installation
> status of a package. This seems to be what James is inquiring
> about. If the documentation system is not sufficiently modular,
> then it seems to me it was constructed without regard to the Unix
> philosophy.

OK, maybe I'm coming into this late and I don't understand.  I'll
summarize what I think I have heard and you feel free to correct
me.

In one camp, let's call it the James camp, it seems like there is
distaste for references to things not installed.  They don't
like that there are See Also entries that reference things that
are not installed.

I'll freely admit that I must have misunderstood because I'm in
the other camp, call it the Ingo camp.  Those people love the
dangling references because it gives you a hint that you might 
want to install that package.

If I do understand correctly, I'm 1000% in in the Ingo camp.  I've
been using Unix for at least 40 years but I can still remember how
hard it was learn that Unix spelled "dir" as "ls" (not even list, ls).
There are a million of those things and they were hard to learn back
then.  So anything, ANYTHING, that gives you a hint that maybe you
need to look over there, is very, very welcome.

If the proposal is to remove See Also's that aren't installed, I
could not be more against that idea.  That just makes the system
harder to learn.

If I'm way off base, my apologies, please correct me.

--lm