I have often complained that, even though thousands of developers are paid to work on the Linux kernel, there is not a single person whose job it is to write documentation for the kernel. The problem is wider than that, though: Alejandro Colomar, who has been maintaining the man pages collection for the last four years, can no longer afford to do it for free.

https://lwn.net/ml/all/4d7tq6a7febsoru3wjium4ekttuw2ouocv6jstdkthnacmzr6x@f2zfbe5hs7h5

uncomfortable with the message that he'd accept sponsorship but no mention of, you know, help doing the work

@khm @corbet getting help would still mean he has not enough money to keep working on it.

@corbet https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/maintaining.html still lists Michael Kerrisk as the maintainer and Alejandro Colomar as comaintainer. Is Michael no longer working on it?

@jani @corbet There seems to be a bit more context in the follow-up email: https://lwn.net/ml/all/CAFs=pgZeJhbDJ-RPgQ1HsdH+ccYHP-ZAd_waFyUrpN49NkS11w@mail.gmail.com/

I completely agree with @corbet@social.kernel.org original point that, given the amount of money flying around kernel dev, some of it should be going to the man-pages project. It's just an odd phrasing that the work must stop instead of being done by someone who might have availability and resources to do it.

@corbet I still maintain that we should just have all _system call_ and associated manpages directly in the kernel source tree. It would make so many things easier imho.

@brauner @corbet Bonus points if the manpages are generated from a comment block that lives right above the syscall definition in the code. Similar to what we do now with the kdoc blocks, but with the info one would expect in a manpage.

@brauner @corbet I'm an advocate for maintainers insisting on documentation too.

Maybe once I get past my book burnout (yeah not past it yet unfortunately) I will try to do something docs-wise myself

@vegard @jani @corbet having written 1400 pages for the book and burning myself out on it I can say I am passionately in favour of documentation and the idea of it being a 'time multiplier' obviously ignores the cost of having to figure things yourself from scratch because... there's no documentation...

The whole book project was literally me doing that.

While I'm being a filthy capitalist with it (actually motivated nearly entirely by a desire for a physical book), it's a subject close to my heart obviously.

It's criminally insane we potentially lose this documentation - it's indispensable, it's used constantly by thousands of developers daily.

It's just mad.

@vegard @corbet @jani Plus, no to go on, but I will anyway since I always do - I personally, personally understand fucking incredibly well how difficult it is to document this stuff, let alone as clearly as the man pages are documented.

It's BLOODY hard work. And I have about 1/100th of the talent of these guys.

@khm @corbet afaik, if someone would like to volunteer they would already do that or can without the current maintainer (even if harder without the previous maintainer around). But I don't really know how it works with the kernel.

@corbet@social.kernel.org Just the fact that ONE PERSON was doing this for years alone should be the warning for this.

@khm @corbet "I can't afford to do this unpaid labor, but if you'd like to pay me for it, let me know!"

"Ugh, he didn't ask for help doing unpaid labor he said he can't afford to do! He asked to be paid to do it! 😡"

yeah I'm not really impressed by the "rewording other people's text to make an easier strawman" shit, you can take that back to twitter where you got it

@khm eh, between your original post and this response, I'm pretty comfortable in not giving a fuck about whether or not you're impressed. Keep being mad about someone having the audacity to suggest they could continue doing a job if someone would... give them money.

not particularly bothered about being blocked by someone who can't tell the difference between "I can't afford to do this so I'm not going to" and "I can't afford to do this so I'm suspending the project"

@corbet This speaks pretty poorly of those thousands of developers who are paid to contribute to the kernel. It sounds like they're all sending code and none of them are documenting anything. IMHO, if you haven't documented something you haven't finished it. Especially in the context of paid work.

@whynothugo There are plenty of developers who write documentation, don't get me wrong; some of them work quite hard at it. But that is usually not what their employers are paying them to do.