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Name
Contributing - instructions for contributing to the project
Synopsis
Mailing list, patches, lint, style guide, bug reports, and notes
Description
Mailing list
The main discussions regarding development of the project, patches,
bugs, news, doubts, etc. happen on the mailing list. To send an email
to the project, send it to both maintainers and CC the mailing list:
To: Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org>
Cc: <linux-man@vger.kernel.org>
Please CC any relevant developers and mailing lists that may know about
or be interestend in the discussion. If your email discusses a feature
or change, and you know which developers added the feature or made the
change that your email discusses, please CC them on the email; with
luck they may review and comment on it. If you don't know who the
developers are, you may be able to discover that information from
mailing list archives or from git(1) logs or logs in other version
control systems. Obviously, if you are the developer of the feature
being discussed in a man-pages email, please identify yourself as such.
Relevant mailing lists may include:
Cc: LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Cc: Glibc <libc-alpha@sourceware.org>
For other kernel mailing lists and maintainers, check the <MAINTAINERS>
file in the Linux kernel repository.
Please don't send HTML email; it will be discarded by the list.
Archives:
<https://lore.kernel.org/linux-man/>
<https://marc.info/?l=linux-man>
Subscription:
Send a message to <majordomo@vger.kernel.org> containing the
following body:
subscribe linux-man
Unsubscribing:
unsubscribe linux-man
Help:
help
Patches
If you know how to fix a problem in a manual page (if not, see
"Reporting bugs" below), then send a patch in an email.
- Follow the instructions for sending mail to the mailing list above.
- The subject of the email should contain "[patch]" in the subject line.
The above is the minimum needed so that someone might respond to your
patch. If you did that and someone does not respond within a few days,
then ping the email thread, "replying to all". Make sure to send it to
the maintainers in addition to the mailing list.
To make your patch even more useful, please note the following points:
- Write a suitable subject line. Make sure to mention the name(s) of
the page(s) being patched. Example:
[patch] shmop.2: Add "(void *)" cast to RETURN VALUE
- Sign your patch with "Signed-off-by:". Read about the "Developer's
Certificate of Origin" at
<https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst>.
When appropriate, other tags documented in that file, such as
"Reported-by:", "Reviewed-by:", "Acked-by:", and "Suggested-by:" can
be added to the patch. The man-pages project also uses a
"Cowritten-by:" tag with the obvious meaning. Example:
Signed-off-by: Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org>
- Describe how you obtained the information in your patch. For
example, was it:
- by reading (or writing) the relevant kernel or (g)libc source
code? Please provide a pointer to the following code.
- from a commit message in the kernel or (g)libc source code
repository? Please provide a commit ID.
- by writing a test program? Send it with the patch, but please
make sure it's as simple as possible, and provide instructions on
how to use it and/or a demo run.
- from a standards document? Please name the standard, and quote
the relevant text.
- from other documentation? Please provide a pointer to that
documentation.
- from a mailing list or online forum? Please provide a URL if
possible.
- Send patches in diff -u format, inline inside the email message. If
you're worried about your mailer breaking the patch, the send it
both inline and as an attachment. You may find it useful to employ
git-send-email(1) and git-format-patch(1).
- Where relevant, include source code comments that cite commit hashes
for relevant kernel or glibc changes:
.\" commit <40-character-git-hash>
- For trivial patches, you can use subject tags:
- ffix: Formatting fix.
- tfix: Typo fix.
- wfix: Minor wording fix.
- srcfix: Change to manual page source that doesn't affect output.
Example:
[patch] tcp.7: tfix
- Send logically separate patches. For unrelated pages, or for
logically-separate issues in the same page, send separate emails.
- Make patches against the latest version of the manual page. Use
git(1) for getting the latest version.
Lint
If you plan to patch a manual page, consider running the linters
configured in the build system, to make sure your change doesn't add
new warnings. However, you might still get warnings that are not your
fault. To minimize that, do the following steps:
(1) Lint first all of the pages, so that make(1) knows that it only
needs to lint again pages that you will touch. This example is
shown with '-j' because it would take a long time (around a couple
of minutes) to run without parallel execution.
$ make -ij lint >/dev/null 2>&1
(2) Touch the page that you'll edit, and run make(1) again, to see
which warnings you'll still see from that page that are not your
fault.
$ touch man2/membarrier.2 # replace by the page you'll modify
$ make -k lint
(3) Apply your changes, and then run make(1) again. You can ignore
warnings that you saw in step (2), but if you see any new ones,
please fix them if you know how, or at least note them in your
patch email.
$ vi man2/membarrier.2 # do your work
$ make -k lint
See <INSTALL> for a list of dependencies that this feature requires.
If you can't meet them all, don't worry; it will still run the linters
that you have available.
Style guide
For a description of the preferred layout of manual pages, as well as
some style guide notes, see:
$ man 7 man-pages
It will also be interesting to consult groff_man(7) and
groff_man_style(7) for understanding and writing good man(7) source code.
Reporting bugs
Report bugs to the mailing list, following the instructions above for
sending mails to the list. If you can write a patch (see instructions
for sending patches above), it's preferred.
If you're unsure if the bug is in the manual page or in the code being
documented (kernel, glibc, ...), it's best to send the report to both
at the same time, that is, CC all the mailing lists that may be
concerned by the report.
Some distributions (for example Debian) apply patches to the upstream
manual pages. If you suspect the bug is in one of those patches,
report it to your distribution maintainer.
Send logically separate reports. For unrelated pages, or for
logically-separate issues in the same page, send separate emails.
There's also a bugzilla, but we don't use it as much as the mailing list.
Notes
External and autogenerated pages
A few pages come from external sources. Fixes to the pages should
really go to the upstream source.
tzfile(5), zdump(8), and zic(8) come from the tz project
<https://www.iana.org/time-zones>.
bpf-helpers(7) is autogenerated from the Linux kernel sources using
scripts. See man-pages commits 53666f6c3 and 19c7f7839 for details.
Bugs
Bugzilla:
<https://bugzilla.kernel.org/buglist.cgi?component=man-pages>
See also
man-pages(7)
<https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/contributing.html>
<https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/linux-man-ml.html>
<https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/patches.html>
<https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html>
<https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_code_bugs.html>
<https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/missing_pages.html>
<https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/code_of_conduct.html>
<https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst>
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