Re: is the man page really 21 years old?

[Jonathan Nieder]

address@hidden wrote:
> >>>>> "JN" == Jonathan Nieder <address@hidden> writes:

> JN> The header line is somewhat arbitrary.  If you have a good idea for
> JN> what it should contain (in the form of nroff markup), I wouldn't be
> JN> surprised if it gets used.
>
> That's the problem, you folks accept headers from just about anybody. No
> standards in sight.

If the problem is old date headers, that's not because they are
changed too often, is it?  Luckily for you, I'm not the one to make
the call.

Maybe there's a standard.  If you have a pointer to one, I assume
people wouldn't mind that, either.

man-pages(7) says:

        date    The date of the last revision — remember to change
                this every time a change is made to the  man  page,
                since this is the most general way of doing version
                control.  Dates should be written in the form
                YYYY-MM-DD.

which suggests to me that we should be automatically generating it
(and that a patch making the setting equal _today_ could be
acceptable).