Re: gettext man pages have old date at bottom (May 2001)

[Paul Eggert]

On 2024-12-22 04:53, Bruno Haible via Gnulib discussion list wrote:
> The question is really: What does "up to date"
> mean for a stable API, that is part of the LI18NUX standard since ca. 2001
> or 2002 ?

I doubt whether there is a universal standard.

For coreutils releases, the man pages say something like "GNU coreutils 
9.5     March 2024    CAT(1)" at the page bottom, and the date 
corresponds to when the coreutils release tarball was made. Although the 
reader might assume that "9.4" corresponds to "March 2024", this 
assumption is dicey when downstream distros install patches. For 
example, on Fedora 40 the line says "GNU coreutils 9.4 
November 2024                          CAT(1)" because they patched 
their downstream copy of coreutils most recently in November 2024, so 
it's no longer 9.4 but is really 9.4-9.fc40 but the man page still says 
just "9.4".

For what it's worth, 7th Edition Unix man pages had just "7th Edition" 
and a page number at the bottom.