Funding restored for man-page maintenance
lwn.net
lwn.net
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.
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.
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.
I dread Linux man pages
I understand not knowing what lwn is… but why insist?
"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).
LWN is not a documentation project. It's a news outlet.
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.
>unbiased
Context
- https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/roff.7.html
- https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/more.1.html
Companies should fall over themselves to fund projects like this
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).
Common sense.
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.
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.
'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' ?
> 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...
You asked if putting a single sentence with a dead link in an email signature counts as job searching (putting that signature in emails by a person who barely sends emails, by his own admission).
And my answer was "are you kidding me"?
I hope this helps.
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.