Bug#604990: clarify man page dates policy
On Fri, 26 Nov 2010, jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
> The Debian Policy Manual should state what the preferred date on manual
> pages should be, or wishes upstream would make it.
There is no need. This is documented in man-pages(7). It is the date the
manpage was last revised.
> Also mention if Debian maintainers should tamper with upstreams' date, or only
> maybe when they add things to the man page.
Maintainer's discretion should be good enough. IMO, one should update it
when one changes anything non-minor (i.e. don't bother if it is a typo fix),
but as long as the changes are sent upstream, it doesn't matter much.
> By 'dates' I am talking about the
> $ man -w cat|xargs zcat|sed 2!d
> .TH CAT "1" "April 2010" "GNU coreutils 8.5" "User Commands"
> line. Which brings up another item to mention: just month and year OK,
> or must add date?
As long as it is not xx/yy/zz or xx/yy/zzzz.
Prose text format in the same language as the manpage is good. ISO format
(YYYY-MM-DD) is good. Japanese format is acceptable (YYYY/MM/DD). Anything
else will be confusing. And personal discretion is good enough for the
decision whether one should bother with days or not.
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
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