who maintains the man pages?
in [General Linux]
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From: despen on 15 Mar 2010 11:55 Todd <todd(a)invalid.com> writes: > Hi All, > > Who maintains the "man" pages? The author of > the program or somewhere/someone else? Man pages are created by the program author.
From: J G Miller on 15 Mar 2010 12:36 On Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:55:26 -0400, DesPen stated: > Todd <todd(a)invalid.com> writes: > >> Hi All, >> >> Who maintains the "man" pages? The author of the program or >> somewhere/someone else? > > Man pages are created by the program author. The manual page should be created by the author of the program or the team creating the software package. However this is not always the case. For example the manual page for tar on Debian based distributions states QUOTE BUGS The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create info documents instead. Unfortunately, the info document describing tar is licensed under the GFDL with invariant cover texts, which makes it impossible to include any text from that document in this man page. Most of the text in this document was automatically extracted from the usage text in the source. It may not completely describe all features of the program. UNQUOTE Or for quite a number of manual pages on Debian based distributions, by the original package maintainer. QUOTE AUTHOR This manual page was written by Joey Hess, for the Debian GNU/ Linux system. UNQUOTE Does anybody ever bother to read Info pages?
From: despen on 15 Mar 2010 12:46 J G Miller <miller(a)yoyo.ORG> writes: .... > Does anybody ever bother to read Info pages? If I get desparate enough, yes. They really do work better than man pages, it's just not the first place I think of.
From: unruh on 15 Mar 2010 12:57 On 2010-03-15, despen(a)verizon.net <despen(a)verizon.net> wrote: > Todd <todd(a)invalid.com> writes: > >> Hi All, >> >> Who maintains the "man" pages? The author of >> the program or somewhere/someone else? > > Man pages are created by the program author. No. man pages are often created by the program author, but far from always. And often the program author is not who you want creating the man page, because documentation is not their area of expertise (ie they write incompetent documentation). And often the author is exhausted writing the code, and cannot or does not write the man pages. Recall that much of Linux programs are volunteers. They are not paid to either write the programs or the man pages. Now if the OP had told us what his concern was, we could have given more and better advice. >
From: Teemu Likonen on 15 Mar 2010 12:58
* 2010-03-15 17:36 (+0100), J. G. Miller wrote: > Does anybody ever bother to read Info pages? I didn't read them before I started using Emacs. Emacs has a nice info reader and the pages are kind of "closer" to everything when I'm inside Emacs. If some day I completely stop using Emacs I can easily see leaving info pages too. Still, many GNU software is documented much better in info pages. |