In demonstrating one of the gaps of man pages in modern times and likely having hindered the adoption of the Linux kernel’s new mount API, it took more than six years for those system calls to be properly documented within man pages. The Linux “new” mount API was introduced back in mid-2019 with Linux 5.2 and since supported by key file-systems after several years but not until weeks ago was this file descriptor based mount API scoped out within man pages.
The “new” mount API for Linux is a set of system calls like fsopen and fsconfig for offering more flexibility than the Linux kernel’s long-used mount system call that is a one-shot approach compared to this modern multi-step design for better flexibility. In the kernels since Linux 5.2, various file-systems have transitioned to supporting the modern mount API. It was only earlier this year that F2FS added support for it as one of the last major file-systems without it.
Askar Safin who was involved in reviewing the man pages for this mount API brought the matter to Phoronix of it taking so long for man page documentation to appear. The documentation finally appeared in October with the manpages 6.16 release albeit is still waiting for the update to appear on the likes of man7.org. There’s a belief that the lack of the man page documentation for this mount API negatively impacted use of this API over the past half decade plus.
Back in 2018 there was an initial submission of man page documentation that ultimately stalled out. Another attempt in 2020 that also stalled out.
Christian Brauner had been maintaining a Markdown version of the man pages, which in turn an adapted version of the new mount API documentation then finally worked its way into man pages proper this year via this patch series.
Following the activity on those man pages, Christian Brauner now working on Linux at Microsoft had some interesting remarks to share on Mastodon in believing that man pages being based in the Groff typesetting system rather than Markdown format are a major hindrance in modern times:
In any event, there is now man pages for the new mount API for those interested.
