6 ms·
Funding restored for man-page maintenance
- biorach 2y agoMan pages maintainer Alejandro Colomar announced in September that he was suspending his work due to a lack of support. He has now let it be known that funding has been found for the next year at least
- janandonly 2y ago[flagged]
- gnoack 2y agoI find this an offensive comment. The GIGO principle applies to documentation, and we would be in a much worse place if we didn't have the man page documentation written and reviewed by humans.
- ranger_danger 2y agoWhy do you assume there would even be too much G in the first place?
- immibis 2y agoIf you're offended by the idea of a computer generating output from input you should reconsider that attitude. That's what they're for. This use of AI would be similar to a (poor quality) compiler, but for documentation.
- transpute 2y agoNth time that AI can repackage human creative labor that was funded by other humans.
- setopt 2y agoSounds like a one man project?
- froh 2y agolife is roff out there.
- dtgriscom 2y agoowwwww.....
- Brian_K_White 2y agomore or less
- jeifneioka 2y agoPlease guys, pun threads are not apropos on HN.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nindalf 2y agoApropos means “with reference to”. Maybe you meant “appropriate”?
- isThereClarity 2y agoPerhaps, but there’s a light hearted moment going on. Context - https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/roff.7.html https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/roff.7.html - https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/more.1.html https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/more.1.html - https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/less.1.html https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/less.1.html - https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/apropos.1.html https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/apropos.1.html
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoman apropos.
- 2y ago
- fsckboy 2y agoI'm not sure what the purview of the LWN documentation project is (in terms of, are those the man pages I look at when I'm using Fedora?) but I really don't like what has been happening to man pages. They're becoming bloated and beginner-y and not terse and dense technical descriptions of what I need to know.
- arccy 2y agoTerse was fine when you had 10 tools with 5 options each. Now we have so many more tools and each has grown a large number of flags. Nobody can remember them all so the docs need to say more. Plus the more niche flags need more explanations.
- fsckboy 2y agoI like the flags documentation, there are too many other words. I also used to like the examples at the bottom.
- necovek 2y ago--help should give you basic docs for GNU utilities. Manpages should be more extensive (examples included). As far as GNU tools go, their attempt to move docs to (tex)info format for better interactivity has largely failed, so I guess most of that content is slowly moving over to manpages now.
- setopt 2y ago> As far as GNU tools go, their attempt to move docs to (tex)info format for better interactivity has largely failed I think the only community where it kind of succeeded is the Emacs community, thanks to the built-in info reader and that a lot of Emacs docs got written in info.
- setopt 2y agoIf you like examples, you might like the “tldr” command. https://tldr.sh/ https://tldr.sh/
- oneshtein 2y agoIt would be nice for man pages to support Markdown format natively: easy formatting, links, tables, tooling, number of ready to use pages shipped with projects.
- setopt 2y agoPandoc can convert MarkDown to Man pages so in that sense we’re halfway there. (But I agree that native support would be nice.)
- tristan957 2y agoscdoc is similar to markdown.
- immibis 2y agoI do not understand HN's obsession with Markdown. It's fundamentally a poorly specified, ambiguous, very limited format. And no, formalizing a single parsing algorithm for such a format doesn't solve the issues apart from different rendering in different viewer applications.
- jbaber 2y agoI just like it because it's a rough standard. Not the one I'd choose and, as you point out, ambiguous. But I can expect support in all kinds of random places.
- not_your_vase 2y agoCool. Unfortunately I couldn't help noticing however that when the maintainer announced that he is about to stop working on the project, he ignored all questions and requests about transferring the maintenance duties to someone else. Somehow I feel the project was held as a hostage, waiting for a ransom (which was paid eventually).
- SOLAR_FIELDS 2y agoCouldn’t said requestors to transfer maintenance have forked it? What would preclude that?
- not_your_vase 2y agoWhat would preclude one from forking the kernel source, maintaining the man-pages separately, and expecting it to reach a similar adoption as the mainline? Common sense.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 2y agoInteresting - why would you have to fork the kernel source here? Why couldn’t you just fork the man pages only, demonstrate to the kernel maintainers the man pages project is essentially unmaintained, then ask the kernel maintainers to make your fork the source of truth? I would think if the man pages project is actually unmaintained this would not be a problem.
- chipdart 2y ago> Somehow I feel the project was held as a hostage, waiting for a ransom (which was paid eventually). This situation only happens when you hand the responsibility of managing a critical domain to a single person, and you forget about it for ages. This is hardly a "hostage" situation, specially when the reason flagged is lack of support. I mean, this scenario only happens due to lack of support to begin with.
- not_your_vase 2y ago