man pages - was: wiki vs documentation

[Lars Noodén]

On 09/19/2013 07:23 PM, Little Girl 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?

On your system, but those are just the display copies.

> Are they on Launchpad?

Yes, they would be part of the source for each package.  I guess that
means they're available via bzr, in principle.

> Are there guidelines for how they should be constructed?

The man pages use a very simple markup but are significantly harder to
get at than a wiki.  See man(7) for the format and document structure.

> Can any of us edit them? I wouldn't mind going to town on some of
> them. (:

In principle the packages are available via bzr.  But of the few that
I've looked at, they are diffs to some upstream source.  I'm not sure
how that works.

Regards,
/Lars