Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!uunet!mcvax!unido!tub!net
From: net@tub.UUCP (Oliver Laumann)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Xman Error: Too many manual pages... Try recompiling with ...
Message-ID: <893@tub.UUCP>
Date: 7 Aug 89 10:44:08 GMT
References: <6481@ditmela.oz>
Reply-To: net@tub.UUCP (Oliver Laumann)
Organization: Technical University of Berlin, Germany
Lines: 23

In article <6481@ditmela.oz> hans@ditmela.UUCP (Hans Eriksson) writes:
> 
> Xman Error: Too many manual pages in /usr/man/man3 Try recompiling
> with larger allocations

Am I the only one who finds this error message annoying?  Is there a
particular reason why xman can't allocate the storage for the manual
sections dynamically using malloc()?

A quick grep shows that the constant is only used in a few places
(some of them are bogus by the way, e.g. in declarations of
function arguments).

I'm sorry if this sounds like a flame (of course I respect the work of
the author of xman), but I hate artificial limits and error messages
like the one above.  Yes, sometimes it's harder to write programs
without artificial limits, but the extra work is worth-while and saves
other people's work.  As an example for software that avoids annoying
built-in limits, look at GNU Emacs.

Regards,
--
Oliver Laumann              net@TUB.BITNET              net@tub.UUCP