man pages - was: wiki vs documentation

[Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph]

On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 9:23 AM, Little Girl <littlergirl at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey there,
>
> Lars Noodén wrote:
>
>> I would like to see the manual pages treated as official
>> documentation. At the very least, they should give a complete
>> summary of the function(s) and options without pointing to third
>> party materials.  Some do, some don't.  All should, because every
>> end user has these pages installed on their machine so it would
>> make sense to use them as the first line of support.  There are
>> systems that take this approach and it works well for them so it
>> could work well for Ubuntu, especially if it is coordinated
>> upstream with Debian.
>
> Where are the man pages kept?

They are all published and searchable here: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/

> Are they on Launchpad?
>
> Are there guidelines for how they should be constructed?
>
> Can any of us edit them? I wouldn't mind going to town on some of
> them. (:

Man pages are typically written by the upstream software project and
then just included in the packages we ship with Ubuntu. As such, any
edits of them should probably be done upstream rather than patching
the Ubuntu packages with our own additions, unless they are
Ubuntu-specific changes that we're looking to document.

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph || Lyz || pleia2
http://www.princessleia.com