Tcl Source Code

In [eb627bda27|this] commit, an extensive rewrite was done on the chan.n manpage.

The most important problem in this commit is that "channelId" was renamed to "channelName". However, "channelName" isn't used in any other man-page, "channelId" is. So, if this is a good change, it should be done in all related man-pages too. Otherwise consistancy is lost.

My second critisism is that doc-changes which are not made due to a new feature should have a good commit message, describing why the commit was done. For example: [d664748a86b7b8b5|this] is a good example. "Rewrite of documentation for [chan]" is not a good commit message.

Third, why was the rewrite not backported to 8.6? Since 8.6 is the current release, documentation improvements are valueable there too.

However, I agree that "channelId" is not the best name what we are refering too.  It suggests forms like "file1234" or "sock4321", which - indeed - look like id's. But "stderr" and "stdout" look more like channel names. In Tcl scripts, channels can have both forms, there is no need to distinguis betwen them. So, I propose to resolve this possible confusion by using simply "channel" everywhere.

Since in Tcl, 'everything is a string', "channel" is an appropriate name for what we are dealing with here.

See: [https://core.tcl-lang.org/tcl/timeline?r=no-channelid|here] for the implementation of this proposed change.