In the previous post I talked about getting the authors of source code. In this document I am talking about getting the authors of documentation instead.

To get the author of a man page, you can either look for the AUTHORS field, or check the man page source code.

The Linux man-page project discourages using the AUTHORS field and recommends putting your name in the comments of the man page source code instead (see: man-pages(7), (Faith, Rikard E. and Wheeler, David A. and Kerrisk, Michael, 2022)). This policy makes it harder to know the authors of the documentation you read. I like to know the authors so I disagree with this policy. The main reason they discourage the AUTHORS field is because the list could be too big.

Citing Info pages

Info manuals sometimes have the authors of the manual on the front page, other times they only have the authors in the source code. Usually they are rigged up so that only some versions (pdfs for example) have the author names in them. The info manual could also have a chapter to credit the people who worked on the source code, or the people who wrote the info document.

Getting source code for man/info files

Downloading source code

On apt, you can download a program by doing

apt source name-of-program

On guix it can be done with

guix build —source name-of-program

After that you simply need to look for the man pages or info pages in the source code.

Extensions and locations

Man page source code filenames usually end in a number, eg manpage.1, texinfo source code filenames usually have .texi as their extension.

Most of the time, the files are stored in the doc/ directory.

Bibliography

Faith, Rikard E. and Wheeler, David A. and Kerrisk, Michael (2022). man-pages(7). https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/man-pages.7.html.

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By Logan Andersen. This work is licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0

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