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Are the 'How to' documents present as man pages?

DISCUSSION Kaartic Sivaraam 2 participants 4 messages Sep 16, 2017

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#0 lore raw

I was reading the 'git revert' documentation and found the following line in it,

-m parent-number
--mainline parent-number

...

    See the revert-a-faulty-merge How-To[1] for more details.

It says that the 'How-To' is present in the first section of the man page. I tried to access it to get this,

    $ man 1 revert-a-faulty-merge How-To
    No manual entry for revert-a-faulty-merge in section 1
    No manual entry for How-To in section 1

That made me wonder whether the 'How-To' documents were present as man pages and were installed when git is installed.

In case they are, how should I be accessing them? In case they aren't doesn't the above seem misleading?

    -- 
    Kaartic
#1 lore raw
Quoted 9 lines · Kaartic Sivaraam

I was reading the 'git revert' documentation and found the following line in it,

-m parent-number
--mainline parent-number

...

See the revert-a-faulty-merge How-To[1] for more details.

Square brackets indicate links, you should have a NOTES section at the bottom of the man page which contains something like this:

1. revert-a-faulty-merge How-To file:///usr/share/doc/git/html/howto/revert-a-faulty-merge.html

To my knowledge those are not available as man pages.

Quoted 2 lines

It says that the 'How-To' is present in the first section of the man page. I tried to access it to get this,

References to other man pages generally use round brackets, for example git-merge(1).

I checked the git-scm.com website [1] and interestingly they use square brackets for these references which confused me a little. Not sure if it's worth changing though.

Regards
Simon

[1]: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-revert

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#2 lore raw
Quoted 7 lines · Simon Ruderich
Quoted 6 lines · Kaartic Sivaraam

I was reading the 'git revert' documentation and found the following line in it,

-m parent-number
--mainline parent-number

Quoted 7 lines
Quoted 3 lines

...

See the revert-a-faulty-merge How-To[1] for more details.

Square brackets indicate links, you should have a NOTES section at the bottom of the man page which contains something like this:

Yes there is, thanks!

Quoted 3 lines

References to other man pages generally use round brackets, for example git-merge(1).

I didn't know they had different meanings for different brackets in man pages. The asciidoc source itself uses square-brackets to refer to man page sections. May the link to notes should be something like [note 1]. Not sure if it's possible to do that.

---
Kaartic

#3 lore raw
Quoted 5 lines · Kaartic Sivaraam
Quoted 2 lines

References to other man pages generally use round brackets, for example git-merge(1).

I didn't know they had different meanings for different brackets in man pages. [snip]

Man pages in general use only round brackets to refer to another man page with the given section (like stat(1) or stat(2)).

Square brackets have no special meaning, but are useful for references like URLs.

Regards
Simon

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