Re: Debian Policy 3.8.3.0 released: localized manpages
On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 01:01:34PM +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
> gregor herrmann <gregoa@debian.org> writes:
>
> > An interesting question is how to detect outdated translated manpages;
>
> According to ‘man-pages(7)’, the TH command in the man page should have
> the date of the latest version of the document:
>
> The first command in a man page should be a TH command:
>
> .TH title section date source manual
>
> where:
> […]
>
> date The date of the last revision — remember to
> change this every time a change is made to the
> man page, since this is the most general way of
> doing version control.
> Dates should be written in the form YYYY-MM-DD.
>
> I assume we expect man pages to conform to the conventions in
> ‘man-pages(7)’.
I'm not sure we can have that expectation. If you look at groff_man(7),
it specifies:
.TH title section [extra1] [extra2] [extra3]
and details how the extra bits are positioned, but no more. While the
man-pages conventions IIRC are also seen in some GNU and UNIX manual
pages, things like the date *format* appear to be man-pages-specific.
I, for example, use the date format '+%d %b %Y' (01 Aug 2009). The
manual pages are human readable documentation. I think that nicely
readable dates should be preferred here.
Regards,
Roger
--
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