Re: macOS Terminal man page URL format

[John Gardner]

>
> And since it's specific to the macOS Terminal application


It's indicative of a much larger issue — there's no formal, standardised
scheme for man page URLs. I encountered many variants
<https://github.com/Alhadis/Roff.js/blob/ba9b904b944c028033b4b4f584521436a34a5d57/lib/utils/general.mjs#L15-L23>
whilst working on Roff.js:

man:name.section          - Bwana        (macOS)
man:name(section)         - GNOME, KDE   (Linux)
x-man-doc://3/printf(3)   - ManOpen      (macOS)
x-man-page://section/name - Terminal.app (macOS 10.3+)

While I *strongly* advocate for the man:name(section) syntax (because it
essentially dates right back to the earliest man pages), it would be remiss
of me to ignore the other formats listed above.

So the exact URL format *does* need to be configurable, preferably with a
separate string for apropos(1) links, if supported (which would logically
default to the `an*MR-scheme` string, or whatever we decide to name it.

But...ugh!  I don't remember this coming up before, but it could have.
>

I vaguely recall mentioning it some time ago, although you dismissed it in
favour of enforcing a single, consistent URL syntax.


> Also, what an ugly convention!
>

Yeah, agreed. Unfortunately, it dates back as far as October 2003, which
means userland tooling has had at least two decades to leverage the syntax.

> Please file a Savannah ticket for this.
>

Wilco.