[Pkg-shadow-devel] Review of Debian man-pages-3.35 patches: open topics: passwd.5 (passwd vs shadow)

[Simon Paillard]

Hi all,

(with shadow maintainers in copy, feel free to CC linux-man at vger.kernel.org)

On Sat, May 05, 2012 at 10:59:44AM +1200, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
> I'm undecided about the patches below, and would welcome comments
> about possibly upstreaming.
> 
> ==========
> http://patch-tracker.debian.org/patch/misc/view/manpages/3.35-0.1/man3/getpwent.3
[..]
> ===
> 
> I have a sense of deja vu about this patch. Did we converse about it
> once before Joey?
> 
> I'm sure that Andries rejected it for the same reason I do: the
> information is covered better (and belongs) in the upstream passwd(5)
> page. But it looks like Debian's problem is that they think someone
> else's passwd page is better than the man-pages passwd(5) page.

In Debian and its derivatives, passwd(5) is provided by passwd package, from
shadow source package, as this package manages /etc/passwd.
Moreover, shadow uses po4a and thus provides many translations already for
passwd.5.

In case of basic passwd (not shadow's one), there is no manpage (like Fedora),
so no conflict.

In other distribs:
- Arch does like Debian (passwd.5 from shadow)
  http://www.archlinux.org/packages/core/x86_64/shadow/

- gentoo uses passwd from shadow, but keep passwd.5 from manpages
  http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/sys-apps/shadow/shadow-4.1.5.1.ebuild?view=markup

- fedora, like mandriva and mageia don't use shadow, so provide passwd.5 from manpages
  http://sophie.zarb.org/search?search=passwd.5.gz&type=byfile&deptype=P

> But, when I look at the passwd(5) page provided by default on my Ubuntu
> system, and compare with the man-pages version, the man-pages version
> seems substantially better. And for man-pages-3.41, I've improved it
> still further (complete page attached):
[..]
> [[
http://git.kernel.org/?p=docs/man-pages/man-pages.git;a=history;f=man5/passwd.5
mainly
http://git.kernel.org/?p=docs/man-pages/man-pages.git;a=commitdiff;h=60017fa5
http://git.kernel.org/?p=docs/man-pages/man-pages.git;a=commitdiff;h=c3e1cb40
> ]]
> 
> I'd encourage you to drop the getpwent.3 patch, and to reconsider
> adopting the man-pages passwd.5 page.

Nicolas (shadow maintainer in Debian) said on IRC he'd agree with letting manpages
providing passwd.5, but it cannot apply for all distribs.

So:
- shadow need to provide passwd.5, because its passwd is different from the
  one documented in manpages 
- manpages need to provide passwd.5, because not all distribs use passwd from
  shadow.

Do you have suggestions ?

-- 
Simon Paillard