Re: GNU rm's man page doesn't name chattr as a "See Also"program

[Richard Dawe]

Hello.

Why do I feel like I am being flamed?

"Alfred M. Szmidt" wrote:
[snip]
>    The man pages are automatically generated. They're just a summary
>    of the output of "foo -h", listing the switches and directing the
>    user to the info documentation.
> 
> They are a summary of --help actually, the -h switch is used in some
> utilites for other things (like --human-readable or -h in ls).

OK, thanks for the correction.

>    So the information about chattr would belong in the info
>    documentation.
> 
> It is quite impossible to document chattr, since as I said it differs
> from system to system.

I'm not saying that we should document chattr. (OK, I wasn't particularly
clear in my previous mail.) I'm saying we should include some information
about chattr in the documentation: like pointing out its existence.

>    Perhaps there should be an OS-specific section in the "Changing
>    file attributes" node, which could be linked to from the rm node.
> 
> Since chattr is both FS specific, and OS specific you would have to
> document chattr for different file-systems, operating-system and maybe
> even different distributions.
> 
> I think this kind of documentation belongs in the documentation for
> the chattr utility, and not in coreutils.
> 
> But maybe rm could handle cases when removing files with weird
> file-system flags a bit more sanley, or make the file-system more
> robust in handling files that it cannot remove.

I was thinking of a section with pointers to appropriate documentation. Maybe
something like (obviously with texinfo mark-up):

@node OS-specific properties, <blah>, <blah>, <whatever>

In addition to the basic file properties like the read, write and execute file
permissions, some operating systems support file properties like immutability
and compression.  These properties may be modified using utilities such as:

@itemize @bullet
@item chattr
on GNU/Linux systems
@item
chrflags on FreeBSD
@end itemize

I don't have access to NetBSD right now, but I would guess that chrflags is a
*BSD-wide thing. Does anyone know of any other similar utilities.

Then link to this "OS-specific properties" node somewhere from the rm
description:

There are additional file properties that may stop rm from removing files
(@pxref{OS-specific properties).

Regards,

-- 
Richard Dawe [ http://www.phekda.freeserve.co.uk/richdawe/ ]