[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#847998: manpages: file conflicts with initscripts

[Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)]

Upstream man-pages maintainer here; I just added tmpfs(5), unaware
that it would create a conflict for Debian; I assume the conflicting
page is Debian-specific(?). (I don't have such a page on my Fedora
system.)

On 13 December 2016 at 10:00, Thorsten Glaser <t.glaser at tarent.de> wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Dec 2016, Michael Biebl wrote:
>
>> The tmpfs man page shipped by the manpages package talks about the tmpfs
>> file system.
>> The man page shipped by initscripts talks about the debian/initscripts
>> specific config file /etc/default/tmpfs.
>>
>> My gut feeling is, that debian specific tmpfs man page should be renamed.
>
> From the usual unix policy stuff:
>
> The manpage about /etc/default/tmpfs can be tmpfs(5) as it
> covers a configuration file.
>
> The manpage about the Linux tmpfs should be tmpfs(9) as it
> covers a kernel concept (here: a filesystem).

Not sure where this idea originates. There is no Section 9 on Linux.
And there's certainly precedent for section 5 pages on filesystems.
For example, among others, we have ext4(5), btrfs(5), and nfs(5).

I'm not sure what the best path forward here is.

Cheers,

Michael

-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/