Re: "Author" section of manpages

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Tue, Dec 04, 2001 at 05:18:26PM -0600, Colin Watson wrote:
> When I write a man page for a piece of software I wasn't involved in
> writing, I do put my name in the AUTHOR section, but in the form "This
> manual page was written by Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> for the
> Debian system", or thereabouts. I usually (i.e. when I remember) also
> put the name of the author of the software there before my own.

my practice is to put something like the following into the man page
(example taken from my package of jdresolve):

AUTHOR
       jdresolve  was  written  by John Douglas Rowell <me@jdrow­
       ell.com>, and is licensed under the terms of the GNU  Gen­
       eral Public License.

       This    man    page   was   written   by   Craig   Sanders
       <cas@taz.net.au>, for  the  Debian  GNU/Linux  package  of
       jdresolve, and is also licensed under the terms of the GNU
       GPL.

i like to put in a credit for debian there :)


and then i submit the man page to the upstream author for inclusion in a
future version. i've never yet found an upstream author who isn't very
grateful to receive man pages for their work...it's something important
that often doesn't get done because documenting something is tedious
compared to developing it.

craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>

Fabricati Diem, PVNC.
 -- motto of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch