Re: RFC: removal of share/doc/{papers,psd,smm,usd} in 2 months

On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 08:55:42AM -0700, John-Mark Gurney wrote:
> Ulrich Sprlein wrote this message on Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 16:36 +0200:
> > those roff sources have been very naughty and will be removed from the
> > tree by the end of the year. Most of those papers are severely out of
> > date and provide no more use to the system. They can probably also be
> > found online using a search engine of your choice.
> > 
> > Should people feel strongly about them, we might be able to move them
> > over to the doc repository.
> 
> One paper that should definately be saved is the vi docs.  The man page
> is just a reference, but the paper on vi contains useful information
> that the man page doesn't cover...
> 
> One good example is that the man page only has very short descriptions
> of all the options...  The paper has a complete description of what
> the options do...
> 
> I guess the real bug is that we've been installing these, but never
> referencing them, or telling users where they could find them...  I.e.
> in man vi:
>        ``An  Introduction  to  Display  Editing with Vi'', found in the ``UNIX
>        User's Manual Supplementary Documents'' section of both the 4.3BSD  and
>        4.4BSD manual sets.  This document is the closest thing available to an
>        introduction to the vi screen editor.
> 
> refers to usd/12.vi/paper.ascii.gz, but no reader of the man page would
> know that...  Same w/ the other docs in the same section..  I'm not sure
> many users would think to go man hier to see where they are located, or
> even know that they might be distributed w/ FreeBSD...
> 
> I think the same thing applies foo memacros and others too...  That the
> man page provides a short reference, and that these provide a more
> detailed description of what is happening...
> 
> Are we installing doc by default?  If we reference these papers in the
> man pages, and a user chooses not to install doc when they first install
> the system, how hard would it be for the user to install the docs?  Can
> they run a simple command to get the docs installed?  Maybe having a
> README in /usr/share/doc explaining that they are now part of the doc
> repo, and needs to be installed if they aren't part of the baes install..
> 
> Some papers I can see go, like psd/06.Clang...  Heck, it doesn't even
> cover C89!?!   :)
> 
> I'm fine w/ cleaning it up, just not wholesale removal...

And e.g. sendmail documentation is fresh and updated together with
sendmail imports, AFAIR.

fsck/ffs/quotas is more or less relevant even today.