Name Contributing - instructions for contributing to the project Synopsis Mailing list, patches, lint & check, 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 Alejandro and CC the mailing list: To: Alejandro Colomar Cc: Please CC any relevant developers and mailing lists that may know about or be interested 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 Cc: Linux API Cc: Glibc For other kernel mailing lists and maintainers, check the file in the Linux kernel repository. Please don't send HTML email; it will be discarded by the list. Archives: Subscription: Send a message to 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 . 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 - 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 the 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 & check If you plan to patch a manual page, consider running the linters and checks 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) First use make(1)'s -t option, so that make(1) knows that it only needs to lint & check again pages that you will touch. $ make -t lint check >/dev/null (2) Run make(1) again, asking it to imagine that the page wou'll modify has been touched, to see which warnings you'll still see from that page that are not your fault. $ # replace 'man2/membarrier.2' by the page you'll modify $ make -W man2/membarrier.2 -k lint check (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 check See 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 and checks 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), tzselect(8), zdump(8), and zic(8) come from the tz project . bpf-helpers(7) is autogenerated from the Linux kernel sources using scripts. See man-pages commits 53666f6c3 and 19c7f7839 for details. Bugs Bugzilla: See also man-pages(7)