Re: mount(8) manpage and filesystem-specific options

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From: Christoph Hellwig
Date: Tuesday, November 25, 2008 - 9:15 pm

Currently the mount(8) manpages which is contained inside util-linux
has a list of mount options for various filesystem.  Now the filesystems
are in the kernel tree and can change options without affecting the
mount binary, and of course do so frequently.  This means these options
are frequently out of date.  All these options also make the manpage
quite large and harder to read.  What do peope think about adding a
(section 4?) manpage for every common filesystem in the man-pages
repository instead which people seems to help updating nowdays when
doing user ABI changes, and linking from the mount manpage to it?
--

From: Karel Zak
Date: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 - 3:54 am

Do we have man-power to maintain the same thing on two places?

 The FS specific options are already documented in the kernel
 Documentation/ directory. I have no strong opinion about it, but I
 think the best solution is to maintain this docs on one place only.
 The place should be in the kernel tree otherwise developers will
 ignore the docs... (it's pretty simple to reject kernel patches
 without proper Documentation/ update).

 What about to keep this kernel docs in a parse-able (ascidoc?) format
 and generate the final man pages from this primary source. The final
 man pages could be distributed by util-linux-ng or man-pages.

    Karel

-- 
 Karel Zak  <kzak@redhat.com>
--

From: Andreas Dilger
Date: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 - 1:05 pm

I see on my system that there are already mount.nfs(8) and mount.cifs(8)
man pages, but this is because /sbin/mount.{nfs,cifs} are separate binaries.

I DO think that it makes sense to have separate mount.{fstype} man pages
to clean up the mount(8) man page.  I've also thought that this page is
a huge mess.

<aside>
I never know what man section to put a new man page in, because the
descriptions of the section numers isn't given in the man(1) man page
itself, nor in any document in SEE ALSO.

I would be happy do just put the mount.ext{2,3,4}(4) man pages into
linux/Documentation/filesystems/{man?} and have the ext{2,3,4} docs
refer to them for the mount options.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group
Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc.

--

From: Chuck Lever
Date: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 - 1:46 pm

NFS mount options are documented in nfs(5) of all places.   
mount.nfs(8) documents only the command-line options for /sbin/ 

...especially because support for individual file systems can often be  
separately installed on most distributions I commonly use.  XFS has  
been treated this way, for example, until just recently.  nfs(5) and  

+1

Just as an example of what could be done, Solaris uses mount_nfs(1M)  
to document NFS mount options (and mount_zfs(1M) and so on), but the  
administrative command interface is always "mount."  The subcommands  
are hidden, and I'm not aware of any visible documentation for them.   
The man pages describing mount options for individual file systems are  
referenced in mount(1M)'s SEE ALSO section.

--
Chuck Lever
chuck[dot]lever[at]oracle[dot]com
--

From: Karel Zak
Date: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 - 4:03 pm

Hmm... man-1.6f-4.fc9, "man man" (yes, man(1) man page):

MANUAL SECTIONS
       The standard sections of the manual include:

       1      User Commands

       2      System Calls

       3      C Library Functions

       4      Devices and Special Files

       5      File Formats and Conventions

       6      Games et. Al.

       7      Miscellanea

       8      System Administration tools and Deamons

       Distributions customize the manual section to their specifics,
       which often include additional sections.


-- 
 Karel Zak  <kzak@redhat.com>
--

From: Michael Kerrisk
Date: Friday, November 28, 2008 - 2:03 pm

Sounds okay to me.

-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git
man-pages online: http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online_pages.html
Found a bug? http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html
--

Previous thread: [PATCH] fs: use menuconfig to control the Misc. filesystems menu by Randy Dunlap on Tuesday, November 25, 2008 - 2:51 pm. (3 messages)

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