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 This means these options are frequently out of date.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? --
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>
--
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.
--
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 --
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>
--
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 --
