Re: To all of developers: please use .txt not .doc extension

[Christopher Faylor <cgf at redhat dot com>]

On Mon, Nov 27, 2000 at 07:50:24PM -0800, Richard Hitt wrote:
>On Sun, 26 Nov 2000 21:28:51 -0500, you wrote:
>
>>On Sun, Nov 26, 2000 at 06:21:13PM -0800, Earnie Boyd wrote:
>>>--- Jari Aalto <jari.aalto@poboxes.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>     I'm thankfull for the great effort everybody is making
>>>>     to get cygwin better and better. I just wanted to make an 
>>>>     additional note, that, would all cygwin developers
>>>>     remember that the .doc file is associated to the Word and
>>>>     the prefered way to refer to text files is .txt
>>>> 
>>>
>>>The preferred method for reading text files in Cygwin is to use a pager such as
>>>less or using read-only mode in an editor such as vim.  IIRC, view is a
>>>read-only mode for vim.  Extention of .doc indicates to me that it is
>>>documentation.
>>
>>I imagine that most of the doc files come straight from their respective
>>packages, too.  .doc files mean something different on UNIX than they
>>do on Windows.
>
>>From http://www.silicon-alley.com/ext/d.html, which is by no means
>definitive:
>.doc (1) t [any] software documentation
>.doc (2) t [any] version of .sty with added comments > LaTeX
>.doc (3) b [DOS, Win] > MS Word > document
>
>Also, I grepped a linux 2.4.0 tree and found 5 files for doc$ and 193
>files for txt$.  The total file-and-directory count for the tree was
>7955.
>
>My sympathies go with .txt denoting ASCII rather than the ambiguous and
>overused .doc denoting what?  framemaker?  Word?  Latex?
>
>The same URL above, under t.html, gives:
>.txt t [any] ASCII text. 

You can do statistical analysis or find any kind of "doc"umentation that
you want.  The fact of the matter is that if the creator of a package
(*not* the cygwin package maintainer) used doc we're not going to change
that.  I'm not going to rename files in source distributions where the
author used .doc as an extension.

If the person who put the package together for cygwin is using .doc
extensions, they should change to use .txt.

cgf

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