Re: Request for volunteers

[Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>]

On 06/30/2013 07:13:45 AM, Rich Felker wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 30, 2013 at 01:02:03PM +0200, Daniel Cegiełka wrote:
> > Rich, you missed something:
> >
> > 6. Man pages for musl. We need to describe the functions and
> > namespaces in header files.
> 
> This is a good topic for discussion. My documentation goal for 1.0 has
> been aligned with the earlier docs outline proposal I sent to the list
> a while back. Full man pages would be a much bigger task, and it's not
> even something a volunteer could do without some major collaboration
> with people who have a detailed understanding of every function in
> musl. (Sadly, wrong man pages are probably worse than no man pages.)

Michael Kerrisk does man pages. The best thing to do is feed him  
information about musl-specific stuff. He can probably do some kind of  
inline notation in his (docbook?) masters to make musl versions and  
glibc versions.

Reinventing this wheel would suck.

> What might be better for the near future is to get the POSIX man pages
> project updated to match POSIX-2008+TC1 so that users of musl who want
> man pages for libc functions can install them and have them match the
> current version.

I note that the guy who did the posix man pages ten years ago was:  
Michael Kerrisk.

(Honestly, posix seems to be slipping into some kind of dotage. One if  
its driving forces these days is Jorg Schilling. Let that sink in for a  
bit.)

> Separate man pages could then be made for nonstandard
> functions or functions that require significant implementation
> specific documentation, possibly based on the Linux man pages project,
> but with glibc-specific information just removed (for functions that
> are predominantly kernel-level) or changed (where documenting musl
> semantics matters).

Interface with the linux man pages project. They don't have strong  
glibc loyalty, they're just trying to document what people actually use.

Rob