The state of some of the man pages

[Brooks Davis]

On Wed, Dec 07, 2011 at 08:23:03PM +0000, Frank Leonhardt wrote:
> I've been moved to join this list because some of the man pages are 
> driving me crazy; they're out of date.
> 
> Fortunately I speak fluent 'C', so I often end up diving into the source 
> code in order to find out what's really going on. But I'm currently in 
> the mood to do something more positive about it.
> 
> But how?
> 
> I'm not talking about fixing typos here; I'm referring to large chunks 
> of information that are simply missing. For example, 'top' does so much 
> more than the current documentation suggests.
> 
> If someone would be good enough to tell me how, I'm volunteering to 
> update the man pages as I go.
> 
> For the avoidance of doubt, I don't want to know how to create a man 
> page, I want to know how to submit updated man pages for eventual 
> inclusion in the next release.

The process is quite simple.  Just make the changes and then submit bug
reports containing unified diffs of the changes in using send-pr(1).  If
the program or API has been changed recently you might send a copy of
the PR to the person who made the change since they will likely be happy
to stop feeling guilty about not documenting it in the first place.  You
might also ask on freebsd-doc if you don't get a fairly quick response
and someone there can help (src committers can too, but you may get
better review from doc committers).

If you submit too many of them you will likely end up being offered a
commit bit to save the poor doc committer some work.

-- Brooks
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