Re: man-pages-2.08 is released

[Jesse Barnes <jbarnes@virtuousgeek.org>]

On Wednesday, October 12, 2005 9:26 am, Michael Kerrisk wrote:
> This is a request to kernel developers: if you make a change
> to a kernel-userland interface, or observe a discrepancy
> between the manual pages and reality, would you please send
> me (at mtk-manpages@gmx.net ) one of the following
> (in decreasing order of preference):

Would it make sense for some of the man pages (or maybe all of them) that 
correspond directly to kernel interfaces (e.g. syscalls, procfs & sysfs 
descriptions) to be bundled directly with the kernel?  Andrew is 
generally pretty good about asking people to update the stuff in 
Documentation/ when necessary, so maybe the man pages would be kept more 
up to date if developers were forced to deal with them more directly.

OTOH, they comprise a fairly large package, so adding them to the kernel 
tarball would increase its size a lot.

The man pages are great; I'm just thinking that if some of them were 
bundled with the kernel there'd be a bit less work for you to do (just 
proofreading and acking changes hopefully).  Also, if they were there, 
it might motivate people to convert some of the stuff in Documentation 
to section 7 man pages (the janitors have been doing a lot of good 
stuff, maybe that would be another area where they could contribute).

Thanks,
Jesse