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Man pages maintenance suspended
(lwn.net)
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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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You do realize that man pages don't live on the internet? The kernel.org one is the offical project website, as far as I know, but the project itself is very much not for the web presense, but for the vastly useful documentation included on your distribution.
The few times I've needed to
man [app name]on a system without internet access or on an obscure utility, I've always been able to find what I need in the included docsI hope the dev eventually gets sponsored, this is one of those utilities that you don't think you need until
--helpdoesn't cut ithonestly I use the man command whenever I can. It gives distro-specific info, that documents the right version and any distro-specific patches
Back in the day with dial-up internet man pages, readmes and other included documentation was pretty much the only way to learn anything as www was in it's very early stages. And still 'man ' is way faster than trying to search the same information over the web. Today at the work I needed man page for setfacl (since I still don't remember every command parameters) and I found out that WSL2 Debian on my office workstation does not have command 'man' out of the box and I was more than midly annoyed that I had to search for that.
Of course today it was just a alt+tab to browser, a new tab and a few seconds for results, which most likely consumed enough bandwidth that on dialup it would've taken several hours to download, but it was annoying enough that I'll spend some time at monday to fix this on my laptop.
What part of my reply is this an answer to? I know we have our man pages offline. But the website here is online and they use Google as a search machine. My critique is using Google and not providing an alternative search machine setup.
I mean that the product made in here is not the website and I can well understand that the developer has no interest of spending time for it as it's not beneficial to the actual project he's been working with. And I can also understand that he doesn't want to receive donations from individuals as that would bring in even more work to manage which is time spent off the project. A single sponsor with clearly agreed boundaries is far more simple to manage.
I see, it was a reply to me why he isn't accepting donations from individuals. The given reason here makes sense.
It's still useful though because you might hit it from a search engine while searching other stuff and you can also provide links to it when answering questions for people.