Template talk:Man

Why die.net?

A question. Why choose the man pages on die.net, not others? --Deryck C. 15:43, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

No particular reason; it was my favoured source at the time I created the template family, and there's no particularly obvious default choice that I'm aware of. –EdC 18:56, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

We should an ad-free page if one is availble. Gronky 15:23, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

I'm not aware of any. Do any of the major distributions have a WWW-accessible manual page repository? –EdC 20:55, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

At 11:44, 5 December 2014 (UTC), the default source for man pages became the Single UNIX Specification, not die.net, and it remains the SUS. The source for "Linux", from Template:Man/Linux, has changed over time, but doesn't ever appear to have been die.net; it's currently https://manned.org/ - see the history for that template. Guy Harris (talk) 06:44, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

@Guy Harris: This is buggy. "Linux" says "Linux User Manual". However, for {{man|1|pwd|Linux}}, this is actually the man page from the GNU coreutils, not from the Linux User Manual. — Vincent Lefèvre (talk) 19:30, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

Given that Linux has managed to reproduce a bit of the UN\*X diversity within distributions, there's no Single Unified Linux Manual, so what term would you recommend to replace "Linux User's Manual" - and "Linux Programmer's Manual"? Perhaps "Linux man pages"? That's appropriately non-committal. Guy Harris (talk) 21:25, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

Why the link to die.net?

However, why to explicitly put "on die.net"? I think this is not the same as the {{imdb}} template for linking to the Internet Movie Database for example, because the man pages weren't written by die.net but "only" hosted by them. What do you think? Best regards —surueña 13:12, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

I think the link should be removed. It is of no navigational or referencial utility at all. It's no different from an ad. Gronky 13:48, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

However, they have been collated and otherwise modified by the hosts (at minimum, through hyperlinking). Also, given that Linux doesn't have a single authoritative man page repository, it becomes necessary to identify sources. –EdC 20:54, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

It doesn't matter how much work the hosts did, and it doesn't matter how needy the GNU/Linux documentation situation is. Compensating unrequested work and fixing another project are not jobs of Wikipedia.

Die.net took a bunch of free docs, and they put them online with a bunch of ads. They're free to have their site, but adding links to that site from 90+ Wikipedia articles is indistinguishable, in execution and in effect, from what a spammer would do. So, no matter how well-intentioned this edit is, wikipedia can't tolerate it. Gronky 16:05, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

Except that it's not die.net that are adding the links; it's everyday Wikipedia editors. (Perhaps I should make it clear that I have no link of any kind with the owners of die.net.)

We can omit an attribution link with Template:Man/FreeBSD, because the manual page linked to is the actual FreeBSD manual page, and as such any attribution beyond stating the source of the manual page as a FreeBSD manual page is unnecessary. That is not the case with Linux manual pages, as there is no single authoritative source. As such, for the purposes of citing sources it is necessary to distinguish possible sources from one another (that is, a Linux manual page from one source is not necessarily the same as one from another source).

I am not arguing for a link as a method of compensating the host site, rather as a way to identify the source of the material. Essentially, if the manual page repository is the official repository for that distribution, then identifying the source is unnecessary; otherwise it is.

In any case, even if the attributative link is removed, the manual page itself is still to the site you claim to dislike. If the idea of linking to an ad-supported site offends you, perhaps you would like to switch the default to Template:Man/Linux, after ensuring that links will continue to function? –EdC 17:15, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

I see your point EdC, and I agree that there is no authoritative source for Linux man pages. But the template shouldn't cite the hosting page but the Linux Documentation Project because AFAIK they are the authors of all core Linux man pages [1]. —surueña 13:06, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

Well, it seems that die.net has not only the core Linux man pages but also from other sources. Anyway, die.net aren't the authors, so in my opinion either they are a reliable source so we offer a simple link to the man page (without stating the source), or the aren't and therefore we should offer a link another web page. The responsibility for choosing an accurate source for the man pages is from us, not the reader to click the link or not depending on the name of the hosting page shown in the template. HTH —surueña 13:26, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

I'm not saying we shouldn't link to die.net or any other ad-supported site. We should prefer ad-free sites over sites with ads, but sometimes the only possible source is one with ads, and so we just live with it. What I'm against is the idea of giving them special attribution. It's not necessary and it's contrary to Wikipedia standard practice. Whether you're affiliated with die.net or not is not part of the equation. "a way to identify the source material" before clicking on each link is not "necessary" at all - and for people who want it, it can be done other ways (by the status bar in your browser). Gronky 15:26, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

And, at 11:44, 5 December 2014 (UTC), you changed the default source for man pages to be the Single UNIX Specification, not die.net; your choice is a much better default, as it's not a particular flavor of UN*X, it's a spec that most flavors either are certified as conforming to or make at least some effort to match, and the default remains the SUS as of now.

The source for "Linux", from Template:Man/Linux, has changed over time, but doesn't ever appear to have been die.net; it's currently https://manned.org/ - see the history for that template.

die.net is still allowed, but Template:Man/doc#General recommendations for a reason why it's not recommended. Guy Harris (talk) 06:52, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

Why "Linux man page"?

If you look at nm (Unix) for example, it points to nm(1) and describes it as a "Linux man page". This is unfortunate, because

1. that man page is explicitly from the Gnu binutils package and not part of the Linux kernel; can in fact be used on various non-Linux OSes. It should probably be called a "GNU binutils man page".
2. if you follow the link to die.net, the man page footers which state that it's part of binutils are removed in their HTML version. Instead they once again falsely call it a "Linux man page".

In effect, the article provides false information, and I see no obvious way of fixing it and still use this template.

JöG (talk) 21:36, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Well, if GNU has a manual page repository you could add that. Obviously "Linux" is being used here in the sense of a Linux-based distribution with GNU and other programs; I'm not sure I see the issue here. EdC (talk) 18:39, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Defaulting to the Single UNIX Specification rather than die.net?

With the comment "default to the opengroup instead of linux specific stuff - be more general - avoid using Linux specificity whenever possible", User:Voomoo changed Template:Man/die.net to refer to the online Single UNIX Specification rather than to die.net.

Whilst a case could be made that Template:Man should default to the Single UNIX Specification:

• that should be done by changing the redirect page Template:Man/default to redirect to Template:Man/SUS rather than by editing the page to which the redirect page currently redirects (that page should continue to refer to die.net, so that people who explicitly choose die.net will continue to get it, or be removed, as the template documentation doesn't list "die.net" as a valid source);
• if that's done, then Template:Man/SUS needs to handle a section of "1" the same way it handles "cu" and handle a section of "2" or "3" the same way it handles "sh", so that {{man|1|ls}} goes to the SUS "ls" page and {{man|2|open}} goes to the SUS "open" page.

Man pages for section 8 shouldn't ever go to the default source, as those refer to OS-dependent tools; they should go to the pages for a particular flavor of UNIX. Guy Harris (talk) 02:51, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

I reverted the default back to die.net. Ideally I would say that SUS is a good default, but existing articles already use the template’s “default” to link to sources and references. Changing the default to SUS suggests different sources and references than the authors would have intended, even if you patched up the broken section names in the links. Vadmium (talk, contribs) 05:23, 12 December 2012 (UTC).

I'm changing the default to SUS. This template is for linking to a man page. If anyone used it to link to a specific page on the internet, they've misused the template. But since die.net just bundles ads with the man pages, I can't see any encyclopaedic reason to want to link specifically to die.net (and there's an option to do so if they really want). Gronky (talk) 11:27, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

According to https://tools.wmflabs.org/templatecount/index.php?lang=en&name=Man, there are only 233 transclusions. If you want to mess with the default, perhaps you would like to go through each transclusion and decide which of them need to specify a particular site. The example that caused me to revert this in 2012 is in /dev/random and still has the same problem, currently reading

Linux

. . . When the entropy pool is empty, reads from /dev/random will block until additional environmental noise is gathered.

The author intended to link to urandom(4) – Linux Special Files Manual, but now it is a misleading reference (SUS does not define any /dev/random, certainly not Linux’s implementation) with a dead link. Ideally this should say exactly what version was used (presumably some release of Michael Kerrisk’s Linux man-pages project in this case). But I do not think the default should be changed until someone can check and fix the potential damage. Vadmium (talk, contribs) 12:21, 5 December 2014 (UTC).

The problem here is that there are pages using this with the expectation that it links to the general Unix man page, and there are pages like your example which expect specifically some GNU/Linux man page. So this change isn't necessarily a cause of damage - it fixes some problems and creates others. Neither default can make all 233 transclusions correct.

The problem probably arose because the template documentation wasn't clear enough (i.e. in the very first line) what this page is intended to link to. That problem might be solvable with clearer documentation. The other possible cause is that many GNU/Linux users don't know that GNU/Linux man pages are neither the only nor the original man pages - but there's nothing we can do about that misunderstanding other than, again, make the documentation really clear and make it jump out at people.

The 233 pages should be checked, but the first step is to fix the template so people stop misusing it, so at least the problem will stop growing. Gronky (talk) 22:03, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

I've done some auditing of the pages that "What links here" found, and cleaned up what I found, whether that involved fixing links to the SUS in cases where that was what should be linked or pointing, for now, to kernel.org or die.net for cases where the Linux page should be linked, and picking other man page sources for some of the other cases.

I don't know what should be done about pages for Linux command man pages (as opposed to pages for Linux APIs, where kernel.org is the place to go) - should we use die.net, man.cx, man7.org, or some other site? linuxmanpages.com appears not to be responding.

While we're at it, do we even want to have a default, or do we want to force people to think about it and explicitly choose some source of man pages? Guy Harris (talk) 12:35, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing up all those pages, Guy. I think removing the default site might be a better idea than redirecting it to POSIX. After your cleanup, Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Man/default shows the default is now only relied on by a handful of pages. Vadmium (talk, contribs) 04:11, 10 December 2014 (UTC).

OK, I've cleaned those up. Thanks for the tip - I didn't realize that WhatLinksHere could be used for the Template:man/XXX pages. That presumably could also be used to, for example, show all the uses of {{man|{section}|{page}|die.net}}. Guy Harris (talk) 08:31, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

Yes, it can - Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Man/die.net. Guy Harris (talk) 08:32, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

I agree that it would be better to change the default to something invalid rather than to some other valid value, though I don't really think that's necessary to change it, and obviously anyone doing that should also sort through the uses in Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Man/default. —SamB (talk) 19:57, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

Arch Linux hosts man pages now

See https://man.archlinux.org/ —Dexxor (talk) 21:31, 11 January 2021 (UTC)