.k5login man page

[Derek Atkins]

Greg Hudson <ghudson at MIT.EDU> writes:

> On Mon, 2011-04-18 at 14:44 -0400, Sam Hartman wrote:
>> Hi.
>> I got a Debian bug report that the .k5login man page  should be a
>> k5login man page instead of a .k5login man page. I.E. man pages should
>> not have a leading dot.
>> That certainly seems true for the netrc man page.
>> Any thoughts on whether there is a convention for this?
>
> Tom and I did some poking around.  There doesn't seem to be a lot of
> precedent for man pages for dotfiles.  The examples we came up with are:
>
> * netrc(5) but not .netrc(5) on Ubuntu (and probably others)
> * rhosts(4) but not .rhosts(4) on Solaris
> * .rhosts(5) but not rhosts(5) on OSX
>
> So, very few data points, and they aren't unanimous.  My intuition is
> that the leading dot should be stripped, but I don't know where that
> comes from.

On my Fedora Linux host I see:

.ldaprc(5)
.netrc(5)

Most everything else is without the dot.

> One option is to install both.  I don't know if the reporter's concern
> arises from the uncleanliness of having a dotfile
> in /usr/share/man/man5, or a desire to be able to run "man k5login" and
> get a man page.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
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