duplicate documentation, was: Release Candidate

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Dave,

Dave Kemper wrote on Sat, Nov 14, 2020 at 06:08:03AM -0600:

> text live in a central file and at build time get integrated (in
> whole or in part) into up to four of these documentation files

I would strongly oppose copying the same text to multiple
documentation files.  Apart from correctness and completeness,
conciseness is among the most important quality criteria for
documentation.  So having the same text repeated in more than
one place is among the worst suggestions you could possibly
come up with.

In general, automatically generating documentation is a bad idea.
It is intended to be read by human beings, who will spend their
time on reading it, and that's a valuable resource being spent.
So, if authors can't even be bothered to properly *write* the text -
knowing that the time for writing it will only be spent once, whereas
the time for reading it will be spent many times - how can anybody
reasonably be expected to read it?

Autogenerating documentation is just disrespectful of users,
and so is copying duplicate text into multiple places.

Yes, the current disaster with groff_man(7) / groff_man_style(7)
should be fixed at some point after release.  I think Branden
probably didn't intend it to stay this way, but did it as an
intermediate step in the complex task of disentangling a large
and complicated page into two logically separate parts.

Yours,
  Ingo