Subject: Re: bug#53209: stat shows wrong, non-existing device number

From: Bernhard Voelker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2022 18:37:49 +0100

On 1/12/22 16:35, Joachim Wagner wrote:
> I cloned git://git.sv.gnu.org/coreutils to add a sentence on this to stat's 
> man page but coreutils/man/stat.x is only a template, missing what I see in 
> `man stat` on my system. Trying to find out how to contribute to 
> documentation, I encountered the following cycle with no answer:
> 
> https://www.gnu.org/help/
> https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.html
> https://www.gnu.org/doc/doc.html
> https://www.gnu.org/help/help.html#helpgnu

Typically, the first thing to look at are the README* files, especially
'README-hacking'.

Re. man pages of the coreutils:

a) they are generated during the build from the output of "$UTIL --help"
plus the information in "man/$UTIL.x".

b) The information in the man pages should be kept as terse as possible,
and more detailed information should go into the Texinfo manual (which also
gets uploaded to https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/ in HTML,
PDF and other formats after each release).

Have a nice day,
Berny