As pointed out in https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/29814, we need to
use phrases are are meaningful on their own, because the man page formatter
creates a list at the bottom. With <ulink>see docs</ulink>, we end up with:
NOTES:
1. see docs
https://some.url/page
2. see docs
https://some.url/page2
which is not very useful :(
Also, the text inside the tag should not include punctuation.
Python helper:
from xml_helper import xml_parse
for p in glob.glob('../man/*.xml'):
t = xml_parse(p)
ulinks = t.iterfind('.//ulink')
for ulink in ulinks:
if ulink.text is None: continue
text = ' '.join(ulink.text.split())
print(f'{p}: {text}')
Logically, this is better, because we're describing a subset of possible
return values. Visually this also looks quite good because groff renders
refsect2 much less prominently.
Also rewrap things, add <constant> in various places, fix some typos.
The "include" files had type "book" for some raeason. I don't think this
is meaningful. Let's just use the same everywhere.
$ perl -i -0pe 's^..DOCTYPE (book|refentry) PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.[25]//EN"\s+"http^<!DOCTYPE refentry PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.5//EN"\n "http^gms' man/*.xml
No need to waste space, and uniformity is good.
$ perl -i -0pe 's|\n+<!--\s*SPDX-License-Identifier: LGPL-2.1..\s*-->|\n<!-- SPDX-License-Identifier: LGPL-2.1+ -->|gms' man/*.xml
Docbook styles required those to be present, even though the templates that we
use did not show those names anywhere. But something changed semi-recently (I
would suspect docbook templates, but there was only a minor version bump in
recent years, and the changelog does not suggest anything related), and builds
now work without those entries. Let's drop this dead weight.
Tested with F26-F29, debian unstable.
$ perl -i -0pe 's/\s*<authorgroup>.*<.authorgroup>//gms' man/*xml
This part of the copyright blurb stems from the GPL use recommendations:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html
The concept appears to originate in times where version control was per
file, instead of per tree, and was a way to glue the files together.
Ultimately, we nowadays don't live in that world anymore, and this
information is entirely useless anyway, as people are very welcome to
copy these files into any projects they like, and they shouldn't have to
change bits that are part of our copyright header for that.
hence, let's just get rid of this old cruft, and shorten our codebase a
bit.
The only difference is that functions are not individually listed by name,
but that seems completely pointless, since all functions that are documented
are always exported, so the generic text tells the user all she or he needs
to know.
Files which are installed as-is (any .service and other unit files, .conf
files, .policy files, etc), are left as is. My assumption is that SPDX
identifiers are not yet that well known, so it's better to retain the
extended header to avoid any doubt.
I also kept any copyright lines. We can probably remove them, but it'd nice to
obtain explicit acks from all involved authors before doing that.
This did not really work out as we had hoped. Trying to do this upstream
introduced several problems that probably makes it better suited as a
downstream patch after all. At any rate, it is not releaseable in the
current state, so we at least need to revert this before the release.
* by adjusting the path to binaries, but not do the same thing to the
search path we end up with inconsistent man-pages. Adjusting the search
path too would be quite messy, and it is not at all obvious that this is
worth the effort, but at any rate it would have to be done before we
could ship this.
* this means that distributed man-pages does not make sense as they depend
on config options, and for better or worse we are still distributing
man pages, so that is something that definitely needs sorting out before
we could ship with this patch.
* we have long held that split-usr is only minimally supported in order
to boot, and something we hope will eventually go away. So before we start
adding even more magic/effort in order to make this work nicely, we should
probably question if it makes sense at all.
