Tk Source Code

Ever since checkin [a7eee0499a], the "::" in Ttk manpage names is replaced with an underscore upon install.
This breaks prior assumptions about manpage names and makes manpages hard to find unless one knows the secret.

$ apropos ttk | grep treeview
ttk::treeview (n) - hierarchical multicolumn data display widget
$ man ttk::treeview
man: no entry for ttk::treeview in the manual.

Also, the manpage brought up with 'man ttk_treeview' makes no mention of 'ttk_treeview', only 'ttk::treeview'.

Not cool. Why was this done? For huge base of Cygwin users?

If not fixing this and living with the mess it makes is ok for everyone then I'll resign my position on this ticket since I can clean it up properly in the OpenBSD port and the rest of you can do what you want.

There was never a real reason given for why it was done and no ticket was ever created for it.

The only reason given was 'the manpages are a mess'. The current solution actually makes the problem worse.

Where, on what systems, is this actually a problem and for whom?

To be clear, I'd be happy to go with having the files primarily installed with the names as used in the source distribution, and then linked (preferably by a Tcl script, of course) to the “real” names.

This is the wrong direction.
The manpage file should be the name should be the *command*.
Fix the manpages themselves or special-case some things in the install maybe.
The situation isn't so bad and this makes it worse. How many broken pages are there?
Re [7de29bd83e]: Sure it passes ':' but what other chars is it fixing? I don't think we have any 'special' chars in manpage names other than ':'. Ulmauts? ;)

Perhaps the right thing to do would be to map :: in .TH and SEE ALSO sections to underscore (i.e., foo::bar(n) → foo_bar(n)) during installation on Unix. We could live with the current text being used elsewhere in the manual page I suppose.

stwo, does [7de29bd83e] what you expect? Since Tk 8.5 already had Ttk, I don't think that anyone expects such a manpage change when making the transition to 8.6. If ':' is the only character causing this problem, then [7de29bd83e] would be my suggestion. Agreed?

This has also affected oo, platform and tdbc, possibly others.
I don't know which pages out of sync but everything I've seen so far is consistent with using :: in all the special places.
I think this change should be undone and any broken man pages fixed.

The one thing I can say for sure is that it wasn't done for the solitary Cygwin user. :-)

There's a nasty mess with manual page names and so on; there's a bunch of inconsistencies (also in Tcl, where some of the things described have “::” in their names) and I don't know if the attempts to fix things have helped. What we want is for the names described in manual pages (in things like SEE ALSO sections) to both correspond to names used in programming and also for them to be the names that you would look up the page by. (It's far less critical in the HTML version of the documentation; people don't look up web pages by name.)