> Von: Jesse Barnes <[email protected]>
>
> 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 [email protected] ) 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.
Recently, I was just wondering the same thing. However, there
are complexities to consider. C libraries (okay, glibc is the
main one I concern myself with) sometimes add some functionality
in the wrapper function for a particular system call. This also
needs to be documented in the Secion 2 page.
Nevertheless, I think the idea of binding the kernel sources and
Sections 2 and 4 of the manual pages a bit more tightly bears
some consideration. In the ideal world, when a change is made to
the kernel, the patch could include adjustments to the man
pages (if relevant) -- then the changes could follow the patch
through the -mm tree and then into Linus's tree.
> OTOH, they comprise a fairly large package, so adding them to the kernel
> tarball would increase its size a lot.
I'd guess that the uncompressed source of the relevant pages
would be around 3 MB.
> The man pages are great;
Thanks. But the greatest part of credit must go to Andries,
the maintainer for nearly 10 years. I'm shortly coming up to my
first anniversary...
Cheers,
Michael
--
Michael Kerrisk
maintainer of Linux man pages Sections 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7
Want to help with man page maintenance? Grab the latest
tarball at ftp://ftp.win.tue.nl/pub/linux-local/manpages/
and grep the source files for 'FIXME'.
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