Re: Move GNU manual pages to the Linux man-pages project

["Arsen Arsenović" <arsen@aarsen.me>]

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Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org> writes:

> [[PGP Signed Part:No public key for EB89995CC290C2A9 created at 2025-09-20T18:08:35+0200 using RSA]]
> Hi!
>
> GNU coreutils manual pages are to some degree incomplete.  I was told
> today that "tsort(1) is a bad joke".  I wonder if you'd be interested in
> moving the maintenance of the manual pages of GNU coreutils to the Linux
> man-pages project, where I could take care of them, and improve their
> contents.

IMO, docs should not be outsourced from the project they correspond to.
Doing so makes them harder to install and keep accurate to the installed
version of what they target.

> I understand GNU's stance on manual pages, and that you might not be
> interested in improving them much, but maybe you're open to them being
> improved elsewhere.

It's frankly better to improve them inline.  But I'd rather see us move
past the woefully inadequate 'man' documentation system, for instance by
providing an info viewer users are more likely to find usable (though, I
struggle to see why the current standalone info viewer is so
problematic, especially since I taught multiple people who got the hang
of it fairly easily).  Installing pages with a richer markup (HTML
perhaps, or a new format that can be easily rendered on-the-fly to
reflowable text or HTML) would also be nice.  The current format is one
of lightly marked up catfiles, and so isn't great in modern
environments.

Given that coreutils manpages are generated from help text, adding a
paragraph to the tsort help text would probably suffice (see sort for an
example).

> The Linux man-pages project already documents the GNU C library, so it
> wouldn't be extraneous to also take ownership of the coreutils manual
> pages.

And it's a source of problems; they don't always correspond to the
installed version of the libc, don't get installed with libc, and have
lead to the actual manual being somewhat forgotten.

> What do you think?
>
>
> Have a lovely day!
> Alex

-- 
Arsen Arsenović

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