Re: Date in emacs man-file

[Colin Baxter]

>>>>> Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com> writes:

    > Colin Baxter <m43cap@yandex.com> writes:
    >> I notice the second line of the file man/emacs.1.in has "2007
    >> April 13". Therefore "man emacs <RET>" will give this date at the
    >> foot of the manual, along side the emacs version (27.1 in the
    >> case of the latest release). Should not this date be amended to
    >> something more recent?

    > "man 7 man-pages" says:

    >        date The date of the last nontrivial change that was made
    > to the man page.  (Within the man-pages project, the necessary
    > updates to these timestamps are handled automatically by scripts,
    > so there is no need to manually update them as part of a patch.)
    > Dates should be written in the form YYYY-MM-DD.

    > Perhaps we could add a local timestamp variable to update it
    > automatically?  It would catch even insignificant changes, but it
    > would be up to the committer to update the timestamp or not.

Curiously, there's a recent reddit enquiry on just this very issue.

https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/hszg0a/hook_for_updating_manpage_timestamp_in_line_1/

The proposed lisp defun works on the first line only of the nroff file,
for a different date format - but it does work.

Best wishes,

Colin Baxter.