Posted by
Michael Kerrisk, Software Engineering TeamOne of the
attractive things for many engineers at Google is the opportunity to do a
20%
project, working (on average) a day a week on some project other than their primary
task. While many engineers work on another Google project during their 20% time, or use their
20% time to nurture new ideas that might turn into new Google products, there are also many
who use their 20% time to write code for open source projects. The Google 20% culture is even
amenable to allowing engineers to do things other than coding: recently my work on the Linux
man-pages (for which I became the maintainer in 2004), became a 20%
project!
The Linux
man-pages project documents the
programming interface of Linux, that is, man page sections 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7. Releases
typically come out at intervals that vary from a week to a few months. The most recent release
(2.44) contains a large number of updates, including revisions to document changes in the
recently released 2.6.20 kernel.
See something broken or missing in
man-pages? Submit a suggestion or even a patch! For information about how
to contribute to
man-pages, download the latest tarball at
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/manpages.
The HOWTOHELP document in the tarball explains what parts of man-pages need work, and how to
submit changes.
