Talk:Mandoc

Tone

A tone of insider gossip pervades the article. Compare these opening sentences about mandoc.

From Wikipedia:

• mandoc (historically called mdocml) is an ISC licensed utility for formatting man pages, specifically those written in the mdoc macro language.

From the official manual, http://mdocml.bsd.lv/man/mandoc.1.html:

• The mandoc utility formats UNIX manual pages for display.

One is stuffed with arcana (former name, licensing, mdoc) and jargon (ISC, man pages, macro language) and lacks context. The other is succinct and reveals context (UNIX). In a role reversal, the crabbed sentence from Wikipedia is insider talk, while the clean sentence from the manual is more widely accessible. Wikipedia should emulate it. I suggest

• mandoc software formats UNIX user manuals for display.

"Software" dispels the ambiguity of "utility". (In everyday usage, "licensed utility" is likely to conjure images of gas and electric companies.)

Some details (e.g. licensing) strike me as inappropriate to a general reference work. If only the opening sentence were at stake, I'd fix it, but similar issues pervade the article. It should be reworked by someone who has more knowledge and interest than I. Mdmi (talk) 16:06, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Article also needs newer information

I fully agree with what Mdmi says above regarding "Tone". Unfortunately, i cannot do the copyediting myself because i'm the maintainer of mandoc, and if i would edit the article, that would violate Wikipedia policy.

Besides, information about some features added in 2014 and later is missing. For example, mandoc now includes a POSIX-compatible man(1) command, containing additional functionality beyond what POSIX requires, and it contains implementations of the traditional BSD programs apropos(1) and makewhatis(8).

Some sources can be found on http://mdocml.bsd.lv/press.html .

If you need additional information, you are welcome to ask me: schwarze at mandoc dot bsd dot lv.

Schwarze (talk) 22:03, 19 February 2017 (UTC)