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

[Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)]

Hi Simon,

On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 10:07 PM, Simon Paillard <spaillard at debian.org> wrote:
> 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 ?

Where/who is upstream for the other version of the passwd.5 page.
Maybe the two upstreams can make a decision to consolidate in one
place? (I not know the history of how there came to be a passwd.5 in
man-pages and in another package.)

Cheers,

Michael


-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Author of "The Linux Programming Interface"; http://man7.org/tlpi/