Man pages maintenance suspended [LWN.net]

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i_donno@reddit

Oh I thought each command maintained its own man page.

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ascii@reddit

This is a post about the man pages about the Linux kernel itself. Pretty much every command maintains its own man page.

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c64z86@reddit

Do you mean the man pages for wayland, Xorg, Pulseaudio, Systemd etc? Are they the kernel man pages?

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ascii@reddit

No. Mostly man pages documenting the C-based API that userland can use to call into the kernel, e.g. this.

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daemonpenguin@reddit

They do.

This is about the manual pages specifically for the Linux kernel. It has nothing to do with the manual pages for other programs which happen to run on Linux.

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equeim@reddit

Why doesn't kernel maintain its own documentation though?

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ilep@reddit

This again highlights how support for open source needs improvements.

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equeim@reddit

Kernel already has Linux Foundation that's supposed to fill this role though. And it gets loads of donations

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QuackdocTech@reddit

Yeah, I find it odd that this work hasn't been paid for this entire time by them.

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One of things is that they might not know if someone is supported or not: some like Mesa project gets contributions from people who are supported by Valve, for example. It is difficult to know who needs that kind of backing and who already has it from employer or something similar.

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Wilbert_Wallace@reddit

Well I'm not updating them 😤

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Monsieur_Moneybags@reddit

According to the man-pages homepage the guy who's resigning (Alejandro Colomar) is the co-maintainer of the man-pages project. The page says "The current man-pages maintainer is (since 2004) Michael Kerrisk." So is Michael Kerrisk no longer the actual maintainer? If he is still the official maintainer then does he need a co-maintainer to actually do most of the work?

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