On 2022-09-23 at 11:07, Emanuel Berg wrote: > Greg Wooledge wrote: > >> https://manpages.debian.org/bullseye/exif/exif.1.en.html >> >> AUTHOR >> exif was written by Lutz Mueller >> <l...@users.sourceforge.net> and numerous contributors. >> This man page is Copyright © 2002-2012 Thomas Pircher, >> Dan Fandrich and others. >> >> This isn't a contact address for bug reports. >> It's a historical note. > > Indeed, that e-mail belongs to history, which is why it should > be removed from actively deployed documentation concerning > a tool that's very much in use.
Look at the end of the man page for 'man' itself: >>> HISTORY >>> 1990, 1991 – Originally written by John W. Eaton >>> (j...@che.utexas.edu). >>> >>> Dec 23 1992: Rik Faith (fa...@cs.unc.edu) applied bug fixes supplied >>> by >>> Willem Kasdorp (wka...@nikhefk.nikef.nl). >>> >>> 30th April 1994 – 23rd February 2000: Wilf. >>> (g.wilf...@ee.surrey.ac.uk) >>> has been developing and maintaining this package with the help of a >>> few >>> dedicated people. >>> >>> 30th October 1996 – 30th March 2001: Fabrizio Polacco >>> <fpolacco@de‐ >>> bian.org> maintained and enhanced this package for the Debian >>> project, >>> with the help of all the community. >>> >>> 31st March 2001 – present day: Colin Watson <cjwat...@debian.org> >>> is >>> now developing and maintaining man-db. That's maintainership history, with E-mail addresses attached. 'man dpkg' points to /usr/share/doc/dpkg/THANKS (which in practice has a .gz extension), which is a long, long list of people who contributed to dpkg, each one with an E-mail address attached. That's historical information, with E-mail addresses, which is shipped with the package and cited in the man page even if not included directly there. 'man ls' references RMS and David MacKenzie as the original authors, although it doesn't give E-mail addresses for them. (While it's possible they're the active upstream maintainers, I would be slightly surprised to learn that.) 'man bash' cites Brian Fox and Chet Ramey as the authors, and gives an E-mail address for each. (It's possible that they may be the active upstream maintainers, as well.) There are almost certainly other examples to be found. Including historical information in the man page about who originally wrote a program is not at all outside the range of normal practice, and including E-mail addresses with that is also within reasonable scope. Omitting such is also not outside of scope, but it's not remotely close to being mandatory. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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