Monday, June 9, 2008

man-pages is now supported

Last month I started on what is, for the moment, my dream job: man-pages finally has a paid, full-time maintainer, thanks to a fellowship from the Linux Foundation. For the foreseeable future, that means I'll be working on:

  • Documenting every new Linux kernel-userland (and glibc) API, and every API change, that is released into the mainline kernel, ideally before actual release. (That's the ideal, but there's a quite a backlog, so I'm not going to achieve the ideal immediately.)

  • Testing new APIs, again ideally before they are released into the mainline kernel, and probably doing some light bug fixing while I'm at it.

  • Design review of new kernel-userland APIs.

  • And of course accepting patches and dealing with bug reports for existing man pages.

Other than that, I'll be helping out with in-kernel documentation (the /Documentation directory) by providing editorial, review, and possibly other assistance.

When I find time, I'll try to post a longer job description (but have a look here in the meantime). In the meantime, I'm looking forward to going to the Linux Plumbers Conference, September 17-19, in Portland, OR, USA, where there is currently a planned track on kernel-userland APIs.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is just goodness! Great that the LF is funding you, and good work. I found
your blog really helpful...-nivedita