This is a very decent proposal but I'm not sure it's worth the effort. Personally, I very rarely link to man pages. Instead, I tend to do something like this:

As explained in man ls:

 

Quote the relevant section of the man page here.

This has several advantages:

• It teaches people how to fish as opposed to just feeding them (man ls).
• I can be sure that whatever man ls produces on the reader's system, that will be the relevant man page for the user reading it (even if it differs from what I have quoted).
• It keeps the information here, avoiding the need to go off site.
• It makes the answer portable to other distributions. I know this is Ask Ubuntu and portability is not really relevant (and correctly so), but there's nothing wrong with making an answer more global and helping someone who finds it and happens to be using another distro. As long as the answer is correct for Ubuntu and primarily targeted at Ubuntu, making it more portable can only be a benefit.

For those, in my experience, rare cases where a link to a man page needs to be provided, I would just link to the manual of the current version and leave it at that.

That said, do we have any data on how many manual pages are different in Ubuntu versus Debian? I have been using linux.die.net and ss64.com for many years and on many different distributions. I guess I must have, at some point, come across a case where the information there did not match the distribution I was using at the time but, if so, it was such a rare occurrence that I don't even remember it. Usually, the generic man pages serve perfectly well.

Given that i) we can generally just quote the man page directly and so don't need to link to them and ii) that the generic (Linux, not UNIX or POSIX) man pages from the sites I mention above or manpages.ubuntu.com are going to be enough in the vast majority of cases, I don't think this is worth spending much effort on.

Now, if there is an automated system that always links to the most recent Ubuntu man page, we may as well use that, but if not, I don't really think it's a big enough issue to warrant building something.

This is a very decent proposal but I'm not sure it's worth the effort. Personally, I very rarely link to man pages. Instead, I tend to do something like this:

As explained in man ls:

Quote the relevant section of the man page here.

This has several advantages:

• It teaches people how to fish as opposed to just feeding them (man ls).
• I can be sure that whatever man ls produces on the reader's system, that will be the relevant man page for the user reading it (even if it differs from what I have quoted).
• It keeps the information here, avoiding the need to go off site.
• It makes the answer portable to other distributions. I know this is Ask Ubuntu and portability is not really relevant (and correctly so), but there's nothing wrong with making an answer more global and helping someone who finds it and happens to be using another distro. As long as the answer is correct for Ubuntu and primarily targeted at Ubuntu, making it more portable can only be a benefit.

For those, in my experience, rare cases where a link to a man page needs to be provided, I would just link to the manual of the current version and leave it at that.

That said, do we have any data on how many manual pages are different in Ubuntu versus Debian? I have been using linux.die.net and ss64.com for many years and on many different distributions. I guess I must have, at some point, come across a case where the information there did not match the distribution I was using at the time but, if so, it was such a rare occurrence that I don't even remember it. Usually, the generic man pages serve perfectly well.

Given that i) we can generally just quote the man page directly and so don't need to link to them and ii) that the generic (Linux, not UNIX or POSIX) man pages from the sites I mention above or manpages.ubuntu.com are going to be enough in the vast majority of cases, I don't think this is worth spending much effort on.

Now, if there is an automated system that always links to the most recent Ubuntu man page, we may as well use that, but if not, I don't really think it's a big enough issue to warrant building something.

This is a very decent proposal but I'm not sure it's worth the effort. Personally, I very rarely link to man pages. Instead I tend to do something like this:

As explained in man ls:

Quote the relevant section of the man page here.

This has several advantages:

• It teaches people how to fish as opposed to just feeding them (man ls).
• I can be sure that whatever man ls produces on the reader's system, that will be the relevant man page for the user reading it (even if it differs from what I have quoted).
• It keeps the information here, avoiding the need to go off site.
• It makes the answer portable to other distributions. I know this is Ask Ubuntu and portability is not really relevant (and correctly so), but there's nothing wrong with making an answer more global and helping someone who finds it and happens to be using another distro. As long as the answer is correct for Ubuntu and primarily targeted at Ubuntu, making it more portable can only be a benefit.

For those, in my experience, rare cases where a link to a man page needs to be provided, I would just link to the manual of the current version and leave it at that.

That said, do we have any data on how many manual pages are different in Ubuntu versus Debian? I have been using linux.die.net and ss64.com for many years and on many different distributions. I guess I must have, at some point, come across a case where the information there did not match the distribution I was using at the time but, if so, it was such a rare occurrence that I don't even remember it. Usually, the generic man pages serve perfectly well.

Given that i) we can generally just quote the man page directly and so don't need to link to them and ii) that the generic (Linux, not UNIX or POSIX) man pages from the sites I mention above or manpages.ubuntu.com are going to be enough in the vast majority of cases, I don't think this is worth spending much effort on.

Now, if there is an automated system that always links to the most recent Ubuntu man page, we may as well use that, but if not, I don't really think it's a big enough issue to warrant building something.

This is a very decent proposal but I'm not sure it's worth the effort. Personally, I very rarely link to man pages. Instead, I tend to do something like this:

As explained in man ls:

Quote the relevant section of the man page here.

This has several advantages:

• It teaches people how to fish as opposed to just feeding them (man ls).
• I can be sure that whatever man ls produces on the reader's system, that will be the relevant man page for the user reading it (even if it differs from what I have quoted).
• It keeps the information here, avoiding the need to go off site.
• It makes the answer portable to other distributions. I know this is Ask Ubuntu and portability is not really relevant (and correctly so), but there's nothing wrong with making an answer more global and helping someone who finds it and happens to be using another distro. As long as the answer is correct for Ubuntu and primarily targeted at Ubuntu, making it more portable can only be a benefit.

For those, in my experience, rare cases where a link to a man page needs to be provided, I would just link to the manual of the current version and leave it at that.

That said, do we have any data on how many manual pages are different in Ubuntu versus Debian? I have been using linux.die.net and ss64.com for many years and on many different distributions. I guess I must have, at some point, come across a case where the information there did not match the distribution I was using at the time but, if so, it was such a rare occurrence that I don't even remember it. Usually, the generic man pages serve perfectly well.

Given that i) we can generally just quote the man page directly and so don't need to link to them and ii) that the generic (Linux, not UNIX or POSIX) man pages from the sites I mention above or manpages.ubuntu.com are going to be enough in the vast majority of cases, I don't think this is worth spending much effort on.

Now, if there is an automated system that always links to the most recent Ubuntu man page, we may as well use that, but if not, I don't really think it's a big enough issue to warrant building something.