Roger Leigh <rle...@codelibre.net> writes: > On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 01:01:34PM +1000, Ben Finney wrote: > > I assume we expect man pages to conform to the conventions in > > ‘man-pages(7)’.
(I've now been disabused of that assumption.) > I'm not sure we can have that expectation. If you look at > groff_man(7), it specifies: > > .TH title section [extra1] [extra2] [extra3] > > and details how the extra bits are positioned, but no more. While the > man-pages conventions IIRC are also seen in some GNU and UNIX manual > pages, things like the date *format* appear to be man-pages-specific. I guess the question then becomes: since Policy describes supposed best practice for Debian, *should* we be more specific about the format of a man page? I think the conventions described in ‘man-pages(7)’ are a good basis for recommendations for all Debian man pages. > I, for example, use the date format '+%d %b %Y' (01 Aug 2009). The > manual pages are human readable documentation. I think that nicely > readable dates should be preferred here. This seems to falsely imply a necessary conflict between “nicely readable dates” and “ISO 8601 date representations”. The fact that they're simple and unambiguous, and to many readers interpretable without further explanation, I think makes them a good candidate for “nicely readable”. -- \ “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be | `\ happy.” —Henry L. Mencken | _o__) | Ben Finney -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-i18n-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
