Convention for naming manual pages: .l vs .1

[Chris Torek]

In article <3403 at cbosgd.ATT.COM> kww at cbosgd.ATT.COM (Kevin W. Wall) writes:
>The accepted notation is to name manual pages with the basename of the
>program and the suffix being the section in the manual in which the said
>manual page is supposed to be placed, adding an optional lowercase L (i.e.,
>a 'l') to the suffix, if it is a "local" command.

Whose standard is this?  (We once added this to 4.1BSD, and later, I
think, to 4.2BSD, but have a `better' solution now.)  4.1, 4.2, and 4.3
BSD `man' all have eight `regular' manual sections, and two `special'
sections `l' and `n' (Local and New).

Anyway, we decided that using either `prog.l' *or* `prog.1l' or
`prog.8l' sections both were bad.  The `.l' suffix provides too
little information (is this a general use program, or a library,
or a file format?).  The `.1l' suffix means the file must be tracked
carefully, and must be copied at every upgrade:  These files are
too easily lost.  The `better' solution is, once again, paths.
The 4.3BSD man program already understands manual paths; all that
is needed is a change to make it search /usr/local/man before
/usr/man, and then local manuals can be properly named (e.g.,
error.3s), yet will be easy to find (/usr/local/man/*/*) and *no*
trouble to maintain across releases.
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7690)
UUCP:	seismo!mimsy!chris	ARPA/CSNet:	chris at mimsy.umd.edu