[HN Gopher] Funding restored for man-page maintenance
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Funding restored for man-page maintenance
Author : biorach
Score : 90 points
Date : 2024-11-06 20:06 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| biorach wrote:
| Man 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
| setopt wrote:
| Sounds like a one _man_ project?
| froh wrote:
| life is roff out there.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| owwwww.....
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| more or less
| jeifneioka wrote:
| Please guys, pun threads are not apropos on HN.
| nindalf wrote:
| Apropos means "with reference to". Maybe you meant
| "appropriate"?
| isThereClarity wrote:
| Perhaps, but there's a light hearted moment going on.
|
| Context
|
| - 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/less.1.html
|
| - https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/apropos.1.html
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| man apropos.
| shkkmo wrote:
| That's only when used as a preposition. When used as an
| adjective it _is_ more or less a synonym for
| "appropriate" and works fine in this context.
| locococo wrote:
| It's one of those low reward high impact jobs.
|
| Companies should fall over themselves to fund projects like
| this
| endgame wrote:
| This isn't reddit.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| If corporate were to ask me to find differences, I honestly
| couldn't tell them other than that one is White and Red while
| the other one is Orange and Gray.
| Y_Y wrote:
| If you make better posts then they'll be black.
| fsckboy wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Terse 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 wrote:
| I like the flags documentation, there are too many other
| words. I also used to like the examples at the bottom.
| necovek wrote:
| --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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| If you like examples, you might like the "tldr" command.
|
| https://tldr.sh/
| dooglius wrote:
| Can you give a before/after example of this happening? My
| impression has been that man pages don't change all that much
| aside from adding new features.
| fsckboy wrote:
| i'll be happy to hit ^R a few times and see if it coughs up
| some man pages i looked at that left me disappointed... I use
| a number of different boxes so could take me some time to
| visit them all
| Rediscover wrote:
| Try comparing OpenBSD (or Solaris or ...) man pages to
| those on Linux?
|
| The one for traceroute(8) has some great commentaries on
| the sample output ("God only knows what's going on with
| 12."). It's a personal favorite.
| petee wrote:
| Anytime I've had an issue with an OpenBSD man page
| (rarely) I take 5 minutes to go play in Linux to remember
| just how terrible it could be
|
| I dread Linux man pages
| dannyobrien wrote:
| I think you knew this, but for clarity: the man project is
| being reported on by Linux Weekly News (LWN), but it's not run
| by them. They're just the news outlet. And an excellent one,
| that you should totally support and subscribe:
| https://lwn.net/subscribe/
| fsckboy wrote:
| you're half right, i thought otherwise, but not firmly, and
| when i followed the link to the site and found a discussion
| that looked like a project discussion, it dispelled my doubt,
| which turns out was a righteous doubt
| LtWorf wrote:
| You are of course entirely wrong.
|
| I understand not knowing what lwn is... but why insist?
| rc00 wrote:
| Maybe it was good. It is now clearly a site of bias for Rust
| instead of general news. You might like this bias in coverage
| but many do not and they are free to feel this way. More than
| ever, we need to hold our news sources to a higher standard.
| homebrewer wrote:
| The exact same thing can be said about "folio bias", or
| "bcachefs bias", or "git bias", or "RCU bias", or anything
| else that's really important for the development of the
| Linux kernel. I don't have strong opinions about Rust
| (either for or against it), and, having read the site since
| about 2016, don't see anything out of the ordinary. Its
| primary target audience always were Linux kernel
| developers, and Rust is becoming increasingly important for
| them whether they like it or not. Would ignoring its
| integration into the kernel be an example of "unbiased
| reporting"?
| rc00 wrote:
| This is going to spin out but Rust is not a fit for
| kernel development. It is a language fueled by what feels
| like a perpetual hype cycle. To say that there is nothing
| out of the ordinary means you haven't compared the site
| before and after. Out of all the languages and actual
| things for kernel developers to become increasingly
| concerned with, Rust is not one of them. To ignore this
| practicality and suggest that having the Rust agenda
| carried forward is incorrect. The current experimentation
| with Rust will end and what will you say when that
| happens? Many already falsely claim the kernel ships with
| Rust when it does not. How does that not indicate that a
| bias is leading to the spread of misinformation? Why is
| this okay for Rust but maybe not in other areas? Would
| you feel the same if it were AI articles instead?
| kouteiheika wrote:
| > This is going to spin out but Rust is not a fit for
| kernel development.
|
| I'll bite. Genuine question. Why?
|
| > It is a language fueled by what feels like a perpetual
| hype cycle.
|
| So just because it's hyped it shouldn't be used? Or are
| you saying that it's a bad language and people only use
| it because of the hype?
| pm215 wrote:
| AIUI the "Linux man-pages project" does provide the manpages
| you're reading, but only some of them. Specifically, its readme
| describes the scope as:
|
| "The manual pages in this project document primarily the Linux
| kernel and the GNU C library, but also consider relevant
| differences in other kernels or C libraries. These pages are
| most of the section 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 man pages for GNU/Linux. A
| few pages are provided in sections 1 and 8 for commands that
| are not documented in other packages, and there are a few pages
| in sections 5 and 8 for the timezone utilities."
|
| Most manpages for individual command line programs are written
| and shipped by the projects or authors of those programs. And
| if there are manpages for functions in non-libc libraries those
| are generally provided and shipped by the authors of those
| libraries.
|
| The wide range of origins for manpages means there isn't going
| to be a single consistent style over every manpage in a Linux
| system (and of course "don't ship a manpage at all" remains a
| popular choice).
| LtWorf wrote:
| > the LWN documentation project
|
| LWN is not a documentation project. It's a news outlet.
| rc00 wrote:
| It is not a news outlet. At least, not in the general sense
| of what makes for a good news outlet. Good news outlets don't
| have bias. It is a personal blog purporting to be news at
| this point.
| homebrewer wrote:
| I would be honestly interested to learn about one or two
| unbiased news outlets, because I don't know any, tech news
| or otherwise. What is usually meant by "unbiased" is
| "biased in the same way as I am".
| rc00 wrote:
| Assuming this statement was made in good faith, there are
| many depending on the area of focus. For general tech,
| there's CNET, The Verge, TechCrunch, Ars Technica, Tom's
| Hardware, etc. For Linux, there's Phoronix, Linuxiac,
| Linux Journal, DistroWatch, etc.
|
| What I mean by "unbiased" is neutral coverage on actual
| news, meaning just the facts. If you pay attention to the
| coverage at LWN, there is an inherent Rust bias that
| dominates regular news. Just try to go more than a few
| days without new articles being published with a pro-Rust
| stance. Actual data with stories and coverage over the
| years would illuminate this easily.
| encom wrote:
| >The Verge
|
| >unbiased
| nkrisc wrote:
| This gave me a chuckle thinking about every time a beginner was
| told to "read the man page" in response to a question.
| oneshtein wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| Pandoc can convert MarkDown to Man pages so in that sense we're
| halfway there. (But I agree that _native_ support would be
| nice.)
| tristan957 wrote:
| scdoc is similar to markdown.
| not_your_vase wrote:
| Cool.
|
| 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 wrote:
| Couldn't said requestors to transfer maintenance have forked
| it? What would preclude that?
| not_your_vase wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| Interesting - 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Well, that's definitely a valid point of view.
|
| But in my opinion if you want to earn money, then you should
| look for some sort of employment, and not be a _volunteer_ in
| a project that 's very famous about being built by
| _volunteers_ , and demand to be paid (or else). If you don't
| want to be an unpaid volunteer anymore (which is a very fair
| thing to do), there are much more graceful ways to achieve
| that.
| homarp wrote:
| in the comment of the article, he wrote
|
| 'Actually, I had added a sentence in my email signatures
| for almost a year:
|
| ``` -- <https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/> Looking for a
| remote C programming job at the moment. ``` (e.g.:
| <https://lore.kernel.org/linux-
| man/ZgifHQoTaDEiga0W@debian...>) '
|
| does that qualify as 'looking for some sort of employment'
| ?
| not_your_vase wrote:
| > A: Hey man, how is it going? > B: Not good, have
| been without a job for over a year :( > A: Aww...
| what happened? Did recruiters stop using LinkedIn? Or you
| made your profile private? > B: Nah, I have no
| LinkedIn profile... > A: Gotcha, M$ is a pest. The
| how many CVs have you sent? > B: 0. I don't believe
| in that. > A: Then what did you do? Did you try to
| look for a job at all? > B: Of course! I put a new
| signature in my emails. And then I barely sent an email
| to anyone. > A: That's 1 sentence, with a dead
| link. > B: That's what I'm talking about, exactly.
| Even with the dead link, I still can't find any jobs...
|
| What do you say? Does that qualify as 'looking for some
| sort of employment'?
| jon-wood wrote:
| I don't think Linux has been primarily built by volunteers
| for decades, Red Hat, Canonical, IBM, and a great many
| other companies employ people to work on it because it's a
| product that they sell.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Instead of stopping maintenance looking for a sponsor,
| wouldn't be better to hand it off to other contributors that
| have already established some trust? Some people may have more
| time available to be active maintainers. I see activity from
| other contributors in the git history of the project.
|
| Is responded to with:
|
| > Such contributors almost certainly don't exist. "Activity"
| from other contibutors != someone who has the time, energy, and
| ability to be a potential maintainer. In more than 15 years of
| maintaining the project, Alex was the only person that appeared
| who could seriously take over the maintainership. He's done a
| great job, but there's only so much a volunteer can do.
|
| There is nothing being "held hostage". Expecting a volunteer to
| train new contributors while still managing the project is
| unrealistic. It is unlikely that any of these new volunteers
| will step into his role for free.
|
| Thus the realistic options were to let the project die and
| other orgs take on the works themselves, or fund the guy who
| has been doing the work for free for 15 years. People values
| the project enough to do the later.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Why is it his problem what you all do afterwards?
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(page generated 2024-11-09 23:01 UTC)