Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!sdcsvax!sdcrdcf!hplabs!sri-unix!wayne@ORVILLE-EC.ARPA From: wayne@ORVILLE-EC.ARPA Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Subject: SNAFU in System V Release 2 manuals Message-ID: <12405@sri-arpa.UUCP> Date: Wed, 26-Sep-84 17:44:47 EDT Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.12405 Posted: Wed Sep 26 17:44:47 1984 Date-Received: Sun, 30-Sep-84 04:12:50 EDT Lines: 55 From: Wayne HathawayWe just discovered an interesting "feature" -- no, it's not documented, so it must still be a bug -- in the System V Release 2 manuals. It seems that for manual pages with more than one "NAME" (such as "brk(2)"), the Release 2 permuted index includes only the FIRST name, neatly removing all others. Note that this means the other names are never permuted into the key position, so THEY NEVER SHOW UP! (Emphasis added, after a co-worker spent a not insignificant amount of time trying to find "tzset"!) And this is strictly a Release 2 phenomenon; the System V Release 1 manuals are fine. My guess at the origin of this anomaly is that somebody decided that having all names in every index entry was bad; it clutters the index and it shortens the amount of descrip- tion which will fit. Given this, an obvious approach is to concatenate the first name with the description (the text following the hyphen) and process it, then concatenate the second name with the description and process it, and so forth for all names. A (possibly) good idea, but the imple- mentation of it seems to have forgotten all about steps 2 through n ... (In fact, this would NOT seem very good, since it would include every word in every description once for every name, definitely more cluttery than before.) Anyway, to put it nicely, this substantially decreases the utility of the manual (except possibly for REAL wizards, who already have the manual "organization" memorized). It would now seem that AT&T owes everybody one (or more) of the fol- lowing: 1) Replacement permuted indexes for all manuals. 2) Fixed source to the index generator program. 3) Apologies. Wayne Hathaway (wayne@AMELIA.ARPA) **************************************************** **** **** **** UNIX System V Release 2 **** **** **** **** From now on, consider it stranded! **** **** **** **************************************************** -- UNIX is a trade secret of AT&T