On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 8:28 AM, Jonathan Corbet <corbet@xxxxxxx> wrote: > On Fri, 6 Apr 2012 13:01:17 -0700 > Andrew Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxx> wrote: > >> This has been bugging me for awhile. Is there any interest in moving >> the manpages into the kernel source tree? Then there could be a >> general requirement that new APIs get documented when they're written. > > Man page (or other documentation) requirements for patch acceptance are a > regular kernel summit feature. People seem to think it's a good idea, but > actual enforcement of such requirements always seems to be lacking. Lots > of people have kind of given up trying. I don't really see that adding > the man pages to the tree would help, but I could be wrong... I largely consider this (moving man pages to kernel.org) a technical solution to what is fundamentally a social problem (developers reluctant to write documentation), and doubt that the technical solution would make much difference. I'd love to be proved wrong, but the experiment would require significant start-up effort. (My collected thoughts on this can be found here: http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/todo.html#migrate_to_kernel_source. Note the alternative idea of patch tags mentioned at the end of that text.) Unless, or until there's a paid maintainer, I don't expect things to get significantly better than what they currently are. The quite significant improvements in man-pages since 2004, when I became maintainer were in small part due to the fact that I was for a short period paid to do the work, but in much larger part due to a huge private effort over those years which over the last couple of years is no longer unsustainable for me (man-pages is in competition with requirements for my attention from family, working life, and (seriously!) seismic events), Cheers, Michael -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Author of "The Linux Programming Interface"; http://man7.org/tlpi/ -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-doc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
