Section of the sendmail manual page
 

Hi everyone,

Of the 13 packages in sid providing mail-transport-agent, four come with
a sendmail(1) manual page, while the remaining eight ship with
sendmail(8) (citadel-mta has neither of them; I’m going to open a
serious bug after receiving some replies to this mail). I could barely
care less under most circumstances, but it does make maintainer scripts
for sendmail wrappers longer by two dpkg-divert lines.

Which section of the manual do you think sendmail belongs in? I don’t
have a strong opinion on this; it can act as a daemon process as well as
an ordinary program started by an MUA. I’d personally go with
sendmail(8) to file fewer bugs (it’s the traditional choice, too).

Cheers,
--
Michael Schutte <michi@uiae.at>

Section of the sendmail manual page
 

pe, 2008-08-29 kello 20:42 +0200, Michael Schutte kirjoitti:
> sendmail(8) (citadel-mta has neither of them; I’m going to open a
> serious bug after receiving some replies to this mail).

I don't think a missing manual page is a serious bug.

> Which section of the manual do you think sendmail belongs in? I don’t
> have a strong opinion on this; it can act as a daemon process as well as
> an ordinary program started by an MUA. I’d personally go with
> sendmail(8) to file fewer bugs (it’s the traditional choice, too).

/usr/sbin/sendmail is, most importantly, a command line API for sending
e-mail, which user agents and other software can and do use. For this
role, I think section 1 is most appropriate, and section 8 is also fine.

/usr/sbin/sendmail can also be a daemon that provides a mail transport
agent. For this role, section 8 seems like the only choice.

Thus, I think the right section is dependent on how the package uses
the /usr/sbin/sendmail it provides, but if you insist on the same
section being used everywhere, then it's 8.

I do not see it as a problem for different packages to provide the
manual page in different sections. But I may be missing something, and
if so, please elaborate.



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Section of the sendmail manual page
 

Lars,

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 09:50:23PM +0300, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> pe, 2008-08-29 kello 20:42 +0200, Michael Schutte kirjoitti:
> > sendmail(8) (citadel-mta has neither of them; I’m going to open a
> > serious bug after receiving some replies to this mail).
>
> I don't think a missing manual page is a serious bug.

Of course it isn’t…

> > Which section of the manual do you think sendmail belongs in? I don’t
> > have a strong opinion on this; it can act as a daemon process as well as
> > an ordinary program started by an MUA. I’d personally go with
> > sendmail(8) to file fewer bugs (it’s the traditional choice, too).
>
> /usr/sbin/sendmail is, most importantly, a command line API for sending
> e-mail, which user agents and other software can and do use. For this
> role, I think section 1 is most appropriate, and section 8 is also fine.
>
> /usr/sbin/sendmail can also be a daemon that provides a mail transport
> agent. For this role, section 8 seems like the only choice.
>
> Thus, I think the right section is dependent on how the package uses
> the /usr/sbin/sendmail it provides, but if you insist on the same
> section being used everywhere, then it's 8.

Yup, that’s about my stream of thought as well.

> I do not see it as a problem for different packages to provide the
> manual page in different sections. But I may be missing something, and
> if so, please elaborate.

No, it isn’t much of a problem, it’s just a little inconsistency I came
across recently. Working on a sendmail wrapper, I noted that setting up
a diversion on /usr/share/man/man8/sendmail.8.gz and installing a
replacement was not enough to hide the original sendmail’s manpage in
all cases. So I have a choice between using two diversions or changing
some packages.

--
Michael Schutte <michi@uiae.at>